PDCursesMod/x11new/README.md

PDCursesMod for X11 (new)

This port of PDCursesMod for X11 has been written from scratch, with (thus far) only the key remapping array taken from pdckbd.c of the "original" X11 port. The only shortcoming of this version relative to the original port is the lack of bold and italic fonts. Once that's fixed, the original X11 port will be deprecated in favor of this one.

Building

• Run make. Add UTF8=Y to force the wide-character version. Add DEBUG=Y for the debug version. Add NO_LEAKS=Y to avoid Xlib's tendency to leak lots of memory (this does limit you to a US keyboard; see pdckbd.c.) Add DLL=Y to generate a shared library. Add the target demos to build the sample programs, and/or tests for the test programs.

• If you've built a shared library via UTF8=Y, you can then run make install to install it. Most likely, you'll have to run as root or use sudo.

Usage

When compiling your application, you need to include the <curses.h> that comes with PDCursesMod. You also need to link your code with this library, of course, and to the following libraries:

-lX11 -lpthread

Hitting Ctrl-Plus or Ctrl-Minus will increase or decrease the font size, respectively.

To do

• Combining and fullwidth characters
• How to do SMB (Unicode > 0xffff)?
• Bold & italic text

The last should be relatively straightforward. The first two appear to be more challenging than I'd have expected.

Interaction with stdio

Be aware that curses programs that expect to have a normal tty underneath them will be very disappointed! Output directed to stdout will go to the xterm that invoked the PDCursesMod application, or to the console if not invoked directly from an xterm. Similarly, stdin will expect its input from the same place as stdout.

Note that this isn't entirely a bad thing. You can use printf()s for debugging, secure in the knowledge that they'll go to the terminal and won't mess up the Curses screen. You can do this for the X11 ports and GL, SDL1/2, WinGUI, and the OS/2 GUI ports. You can't with the other ports (they all do have terminals under them) or when building with ncurses.

Distribution Status

The files in this directory are released to the public domain.