ncursesw

This is a fat wrapper around the ncurses TUI library, it's purpose is too make the ncurses functionally safe to use but please be aware that there are certian functions within the native ncurses library that are inheritenly unsafe and under certian circumstances can cause unpredictable results, these functions have been implemented and can be called but have been marked as depreciated as of version 0.1.2/0.1.3.

This crate supports ncurses ABI 6.1 and above.

There are actually three layers of ncurses functions exposed within this library, the raw unsafe functions that are generated with bindgen which are available in ncursesw::shims::bindings, a layer above this which again are mainly unsafe but protect the calling code to a certian degree with assetions (some functions will also have a slight rust wrapping (for example functions returning a raw pointer) but are in the whole left as per the bindgen version), these can be found in ncursesw::shims::{ncurses, npanels, nmouse, nmenu}. Last but not least there are the safe (within the limits of ncurses itself) functions in ncursesw and ncursesw::{menu, mouse, panels} which retain thier original ncurses names but have been rustified.

ncurses modules implemented and rustified so far are the main ncurses library, mouse (version 2 only), panels and menu, the forms module will be implemented in the near future.

There is a companion crate which acts as a wrapper around this crate ncursesw-win which abstracts away the raw pointers that ncurses uses and functions in a more safe way, however a knowledge of how ncurses works is advised to use the true power of this library.

Requirements

At the moment this crate has only been tested on 64-bit Linux (Linux Mint 19.1) so should work on debian 64-bit flavors of Linux but this is as yet unproven.

Inclusion

[dependencies]
ncursesw = "0.4"

Or to use the latest git version

[dependencies]
ncursesw = { git = "https://github.com/narfit66/ncursesw-rs" }

Building

This crate has only been tested on Debian based x86_64 Linux (see above).

You need to have the ncurses library (ABI 6 and above) installed on your system, included in the root directory of this project are two bin script which will download ncurses library ABI 6.1 ncurses-install (this will download into /usr/local/src) and ncurses-compile which will compile and install ncurses into /usr/lib with wide character and extended color support.

The compiled library will be built in the target directory.

cargo build

How to Use

extern crate ncursesw;

use ncursesw::*;

This library follows the basic principles that are used when using ncurses with C, it supports the standard ascii functions (the add function seem to support unicode characters out of the box in ABI 6 if not earlier), ascii characters with attributes and/or color (chtype), wide characters (wchar_t/wint_t) and complex characters with attributes and color (cchar_t).

Color pairs and attributes are dealt with in two modules. The normal module deals with the standard ansi color pairs defined internally within ncurses as short_t/i16 and the extend module is for extended color pairs that are defined internally within ncurses as i32. Because the normal color pairs are actually an attribute within ncurses both modules also implement there own attribute and attributes types.

To use attributes and color pairs

use ncursesw::normal::*; // for 'ansi' color pairs and attributes...
use ncursesw::extend::*; // or for 'extended' color pairs and attributes.

To use the panels functions

use ncursesw::panels::*;

To use the mouse functions

use ncursesw::mouse::*;

To use the menu functions

use ncursesw::menu::*;

All features are supported as of ncurses ABI 6.1 including extended color pairs, soft labels, ripoff lines, panels, mouse and menus, i would suggest examining ncurses maintainer Thomas E. Dickey online documentation and also the panels, mouse and menu documentation, if you get the chance have a read of the book Dan Gookin's Guide to Ncurses Programming by well i guessing here but i'm thinking it's Dan Gookin, this is a good primer to gain an understanding in how to use this library. In both cases you will need a basic knowlege of 'C'.

Alternativly have a look at the crate ncursesw-win which wraps this crate safely by not exposing any of the ncurses library raw pointers and by encapsulating them in formalised structures.

Documentation

Please use cargo doc --open for this crate for the time being!.

License

Licensed under the MIT license, see LICENSE