Re: curses issue

[Thomas Dickey]

On Thu, 25 Feb 2010, Ahmed Raafat wrote:

> Im a unix student, and i'm having a problem understanding the usage of 
> curses c-class of functions. I'm trying to incorporate them in a shell 
> i'm creating inorder to be able to display the time on the shell 
> constantly on the top right hand corner. Im trying to fork a process 
> that displays the time and run in the background and refreshes every 3 
> secs to write the time and return the cursor to the shell initial 
> position.Is there any help that u can provide in helping me achieve 
> this.

curses as such doesn't do _that_, since it operates on either the whole
screen, or on a single line.

Instead, you could use the lower-level terminfo calls to do some of this
(move the cursor, write text using the terminal capabilities that make
it bold, colored or whatever you need).  But there's a part that isn't
in either - determining where the cursor was orginally on the screen.
That could be done as in the resize program (bundled with xterm), which
reads the vt100-style cursor position report.

Even with those, you'd still be limited to working with relatively
static shell prompts (even when flushing I/O) since interrupting another
program that sends escape sequences to the terminal, such as a text editor
would make occasional messes on the screen.

That's all doable - enjoy...

--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net