Re: question about low-levels windows emulation of curses

[Thomas Dickey]

On Sat, May 25, 2002 at 01:36:03AM -0400, Rapp, Perry wrote:
> I'm working on a Win32 emulation of curses.
> It is fairly primitive, but it does the job
> for the Windows port of lifelines (lifelines.sourceforge.net).
> (I've just added arrows & page up/down & home/end keys,
> and hit a bug described in #1 below.)
> 
> Anyway, I've two questions:
> 
>  #1a) Does anyone know how to use ReadConsoleInput
>       to read keys on MS-Windows without wrecking the
>       Alt shortcuts to generate non-ascii input ?
>       I suppose this is not an ncurses question, but I
>        had thought whoever did the Windows part of ncurses
>        might have hit the same snag I'm hitting, however, 
>        #2 means I may not get any help here :)

we've done some of that in vile - handling specific cases to map into
key-bindings.  But we didn't consider retaining the shortcut definitions.
        http://dickey.his.com/vile/vile.html
 
>  #1b) Any suggested directions, where I might find someone
>       who has done an MS-Windows version of curses code ?

PDCurses does this - just glancing at the code, it looks much like the
approach in vile which does specific cases.

>  #2) On the gnu ncurses home page, the TODO seems to imply
>      the gnu ncurses package has no MS-Windows port. Now
>      this emulation file is a fairly primitive implementation
>      (it doesn't do panels or menus, and does not use any
>       terminfo or termcap db -- it only works with console
>       windows under MS-Windows), but it is open source -- so if
>       anyone wants to add it or some portion to ncurses, please
>       let me know.

PDCurses doesn't do forms or menus but has a variation of the panel library. 
(It also doesn't do terminfo).
 
> 
>  #3) re: ncurses/README typo
>      In the ncurses-5.2 package I just downloaded now, the
>      ncurses/README file says to see misc/hackguide.html,
>      but that file is not present. However, there is a file
>      doc/hackguide.doc.

According to my log it is correct in the post-5.2 sources - maybe I'm looking
in the wrong place.
 
> Cordially,
> 
> Perry
> (I'm not subscribed to the ncurses list, which looks very high traffic,

It doesn't get much traffic (not like mutt-users, for example ;-)

> but I can check it via web to see if I get a response.)
> 
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-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <address@hidden>
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net