Rockbox Development > Feature Ideas

ncurses-alike for pluginlib?

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torne:
I'm developing a Frotz port at the moment and the port includes a text buffering system for Rockbox that allows things like partial screen scrolling and re-printing the screen contents after popping up fullscreen menus or the virtual keyboard. It's not very advanced yet but Frotz will ultimately need many (n)curses-like capabilities from it.

I'm wondering if it would be useful to pull this code out and put it in pluginlib, to provide a generic interface for treating the LCD like a monospaced text console. It might be useful when porting other text console applications, though some thought is still needed to work out how to do input nicely. However, the Frotz port is ultimately likely to evolve beyond the need for it at some future point (using proportional text and other niceties that GUI ports of Frotz have), so I'd only really want to put the effort in to make it a useful library if people were likely to use it for other plugins :)

Opinions, anyone? Would such a thing be useful? Also, if you think it would be useful, would you prefer if it replicated the API of (n)curses as much as possible, or is it not important? (or do you actively dislike curses? *grin*)

JdGordon:
definetly put it in a seperate lib... it might even be useful enough to put in the core

torne:

--- Quote from: JdGordon on July 01, 2009, 08:58:48 PM ---definetly put it in a seperate lib... it might even be useful enough to put in the core

--- End quote ---
So what would you port using it? :)
It's unlikely that it'd want to go in the core, it requires a reasonable amount of memory for text buffering, more if scrollback is wanted. In pluginlib it will only bloat the memory usage of plugins that want it :)

Any opinion on curses-like API or not?

JdGordon:
I wouldnt port anything, ut I'm sure someone might...

and I havnt used the curses API so I cant comment

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