[Coco] What Is curses?

[Tim Fadden]

William Schaub wrote:
> Mark McDougall wrote:
>> James Dessart wrote:
>>
>>> It makes it easier to write software with a console interface.
>>
>> I used it for one project in the past, and I'd suggest that the above 
>> statement is true only for _some_ definitions of the word "easier" ;)
>>
>> Personally, I thought it was ghastly. I'll never use it again.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
> Basically it allows you to write a character based terminal 
> application that takes advantage of advanced terminal features like 
> character attributes, cursor movement and soforth. and make it run on 
> more than one terminal. (it abstracts on top of a database describing 
> different terminals and the terminal specific control codes for each 
> terminal in the database)
>
> It also allows you to keep track of where the cursor is and address 
> different areas of the screen etc.  pretty much all UNIX based 
> terminal applications use some form of the curses library (or 
> something very similar to curses, in the case of the slrn news reader 
> and a few other applications)
>
> hope this makes things more clear. In either case there is a ton of 
> applications that depend on curses out there and porting them to OS9 
> would require a mostly working curses library. preferably one that 
> didn't just understand the OS9 terminal escapes. (because if you have 
> a serial port you might want to hook up a VT100 or VT220 to it as an 
> extra login terminal, or access OS9 from a PC running a terminal 
> emulator software for example)
>
>
> I actually use an old IBM 3151 terminal every time I go home for 
> Christmas I hook it into my Linux laptop to get an extra head and a 
> much superior (Model M style clicky keyboard) keyboard for when I have 
> to do any real work. I actually find editing source on the green 
> screen terminal easier and I can use the graphical screen to display 
> reference material on the web etc.  its a bit archaic but I don't 
> think I will ever throw out any of my terminals.  being able to use 
> one with the coco would be rather nice.
>
>
>
>
>
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>
The editor "scred" that comes with the development pack has this feature 
(working with different terminals).  I am surprised that no other os9 
programs took the advantage of the os9 termset file. Does anybody have 
the source for scred?  does it use a curses like library? Or is there 
some other library that is not supplied with coco os9 that has the 
functions?  Its obviously not as full featured as curses, but does 
handle many text screen attributes, more on the scale of the 6809L2 
capabilities.

Tim Fadden