Re: Desiderata. [LONG, sorry]

[Frank Heckenbach]

Ged Haywood wrote:

> (a) Control of the shape of the cursor - yes, I know it might involve
> hardware and it might not be appropriate for ncurses to do things like
> that but I thought I'd canvas opinion.  Somehow or other I'll have to
> do it anyway, because I have users Out There who would be upset if the
> cursor were suddenly to start doing things differently.  They are all
> using the i386 console.  Dumb terminal users (users of dumb terminals,
> I mean:) don't need to have any fancy screen stuff.  On the PC console
> I just need to make the cursor a full character block for insert mode,
> a half character block for overtype mode, and occasionally maybe make
> it vanish and come back again.

See curs_set(). However, it's not supported on all terminals. On the
Linux console, you need kernel >= 2.2 and the terminfo from ncurses
>= 5.0 (shouldn't be a problem today). For xterms I'm not sure which
ones support it.

> (b) Control of NUMLOCK and CAPSLOCK if they exist.  And SCROLLLOCK and
> SHIFTLOCK too while we're about it.  I want any little lights to light
> and/or extinguish; I want the terminal, console or whatever to behave
> like the user will expect it to behave when those lights are variously
> lit and/or extinguished; I want it all under my control so that when I
> switch windows the lights (and keyboard status) can be made to follow
> the WINDOW*s or not, at my option.  I will happily deal with the code
> which links a WINDOW* to its keyboard state.

I don't think ncurses has any support for this. For a Linux only
solution you might want to look at the setleds program (I think it
uses some ioctl's).

> (c) Permission to use the ESCAPE key freely.  Hell, it's just a key,
> but a very heavily loaded one and in my view it's unacceptable for a
> screen handler to place restrictions on its use.  Pesky users again.
> Actually I'm using it now and I'm having no problems with timeouts on
> the PC console - is the restriction only for the case of keypad=TRUE?

On the console, I set ESCDELAY (environment variable) to 10, and the
escape key works as expected. When running a program over a network
connection, it might be necessary to increase ESCDELAY, otherwise
e.g. function keys won't work properly.

> [Q2] It seems daft to have to maintain my system using two different
> screen packages so I thought about porting ncurses to DOS.  This gets
> a mention in the ncurses TO-DO file but it seems like it's been just
> a mention for several years now.  Has anyone picked up the gauntlet?

I've heard about a port to DJGPP, but I don't know details. There's
also PDCurses which runs on Dos, Windows, etc., and also under X11
without an xterm (i.e., if you have problems in xterms, you might
want to try it as an alternative). The interface is compatible, and
I routinely compile my programs with both ncurses for console and
PDCurses for X11 (and Dos if I ever need it again).

> [PS] Since joining the list I have received truckloads of SPAM through
> the list server.  Is this a common experience?

Unfortunately yes. :-(

Frank

-- 
Frank Heckenbach, address@hidden
http://fjf.gnu.de/
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