32 ms·

I like ncurses, and have been a fan of this interface for 20 years. I know that these days, we are supposed to build web interfaces, push them on to a load-bala

by sn41 10y ago

I like ncurses, and have been a fan of this interface for 20 years. I know that these days, we are supposed to build web interfaces, push them on to a load-balanced server and so forth, but I think small tools which can be run on the linux terminal are still relevant. Whenever the application is a single-user app, and the data not too huge, this kind of an app has its charming simplicity. I am not an expert developer, but I like this project!

iveqy 10y ago
Thanks for your support. A comment about the single user and huge data. I've a test database with 100 000 account, 1 000 000 events, etc. That is about 2 gb in size. Not huge, but not tiny either. There's no multiuser support yet, but I plan to add it.
jlebrech 10y ago
I want to be able to create an ncurses app first and then have a renderer create a web app from the ncurses app.
- vog 10y ago
  Perhaps a more fruitful approach would be to generate both from a common abstraction. Otherwise, you either impose ncurses look&feel to the web (might look like a web terminal emulator), or you force the web into the terminal (might look like a text browser e.g. w3m, lynx, links, elinks)
  - jlebrech 10y ago
    you'd create a markup with component names, instead of html. so you'd have panel, button, divider, pane, window, menu, etc as tags. you can then render those using polymer or react etc. and none of it is polluted by garish html.
  - jongold 10y ago
    Why not use https://github.com/Yomguithereal/react-blessed https://github.com/Yomguithereal/react-blessed ?
- powercf 10y ago
  I have used ncurses to build a simple backend interface, that I use for testing new features etc. The end result looks nice, and is functional, but ncurses the library is a pain. It feels like something that would not be written by a programmer today: C, manual pointer-management, the interface feels too low-level. I ended up writing a C++ wrapper around it, adding thread-safety, better scrolling and some convenience functions (the ncurses form library I believe was a particular pain). What I would like is a high-quality redesign of ncurses with a modern C++ interface.
  - marssaxman 10y ago
    A modernized curses library with clean UTF-8 support would be really nice. There's no need to make it a drop-in system library replacement, either, so there's no need to maintain ABI compatibility, as ncurses does.
    - powercf 10y ago
      re. UTF-8 support: ncurses does include this, in libncursesw. It seems to work, although I haven't tried anything outside of Latin-1.
  - mingodad 10y ago
    Probably someone will remember this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision Turbo Vision is a DOS-based character-mode text user interface (TUI) framework developed around 1990 by Borland for Pascal, and C++.
fiatjaf 10y ago
Wrong, if the data is huge it is better to have it running totally on your machine. This is the most scalable as you can get, plus you get infinite bandwidth.

by sn41 10y ago

iveqy 10y ago

Thanks for your support. A comment about the single user and huge data. I've a test database with 100 000 account, 1 000 000 events, etc. That is about 2 gb in size. Not huge, but not tiny either. There's no multiuser support yet, but I plan to add it.

jlebrech 10y ago

I want to be able to create an ncurses app first and then have a renderer create a web app from the ncurses app.

vog 10y ago
Perhaps a more fruitful approach would be to generate both from a common abstraction. Otherwise, you either impose ncurses look&feel to the web (might look like a web terminal emulator), or you force the web into the terminal (might look like a text browser e.g. w3m, lynx, links, elinks)
- jlebrech 10y ago
  you'd create a markup with component names, instead of html. so you'd have panel, button, divider, pane, window, menu, etc as tags. you can then render those using polymer or react etc. and none of it is polluted by garish html.
- jongold 10y ago
  Why not use https://github.com/Yomguithereal/react-blessed https://github.com/Yomguithereal/react-blessed ?
powercf 10y ago
I have used ncurses to build a simple backend interface, that I use for testing new features etc. The end result looks nice, and is functional, but ncurses the library is a pain. It feels like something that would not be written by a programmer today: C, manual pointer-management, the interface feels too low-level. I ended up writing a C++ wrapper around it, adding thread-safety, better scrolling and some convenience functions (the ncurses form library I believe was a particular pain). What I would like is a high-quality redesign of ncurses with a modern C++ interface.
- marssaxman 10y ago
  A modernized curses library with clean UTF-8 support would be really nice. There's no need to make it a drop-in system library replacement, either, so there's no need to maintain ABI compatibility, as ncurses does.
  - powercf 10y ago
    re. UTF-8 support: ncurses does include this, in libncursesw. It seems to work, although I haven't tried anything outside of Latin-1.
- mingodad 10y ago
  Probably someone will remember this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision Turbo Vision is a DOS-based character-mode text user interface (TUI) framework developed around 1990 by Borland for Pascal, and C++.

fiatjaf 10y ago

Wrong, if the data is huge it is better to have it running totally on your machine. This is the most scalable as you can get, plus you get infinite bandwidth.