ncurses applications: best practices

[Sentinel]

Just one more for today. (Apologies for using the bugs forum for this 
question).

I wish to know if there are some "best practices" for writing ncurses 
apps. The applications need to be configurable by users, say like 
pine/alpine.

Some example questions are:

1. Do you implement help messages, error messages etc as fields or do 
you just mvwaddstr them? In the latter case, often the previous value can 
be seen. I first implemented a help line as a field. That was great, it 
was part of the form. Later i removed it, since whenever I looped through 
"fields" i would have to ignore the help field.

But now I am wondering whether all labels, message fields etc should be 
form fields for better manageability.

2. Multi-line field handing. I am slowly learning things here -- it wuld 
really help if there is some place where someone has documented this.

e.g. I have already mentioned the point of newlines in another mail.

How do you implement navigation. I was unhappy using KEY_UP and DOWN for 
navigation across fields, and using something else for lines. So i use the 
same for lines as well, checking for an error. I first try to move to 
prev/next line, if that fails then i move to next/prev field.

3. Saving. Unless I tab out of a field, the value is not stored. On 
pressing the save key, i tried getting the formdriver to move to next 
field but that did not result in the field value being set.

4. the "field" object does not take a label or id of any kind. Do you 
maintain another array of fieldnames to map a fieldname to a field object?

If there is some other forum appropriate for my questions, pls let me 
know. I am really enjoying ncurses, thanks a lot for your efforts in 
maintaining the package.

rkumar
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ruby 1.8.7  | os x 10.5.4 |  vim 7