C++ Curses/NCurses Library

Usage:

Somewhere in your program, usually as a global, though it need not be global, define the singleton CppCurses:

CppCurses curses;

This is not active until you open it thusly:

Window *main_win = nullptr;

if ( !(main_win = curses.open()) )
    abort();

The main window may also be fetched any time after curses is open, with:

main_win = curses.main_window();

Curses can later be shutdown with:

curses.close();

From this point on, your interactions should be with the returned Window objects. For example:

Window *w = main_win->new_window(15,20,8,30);
std::unique_ptr up_w(w);

w->mvprintf(2,3,"This is {2,3} within w ");

The std::unique_ptr will delete the window when your code goes out of scope, to automatically delete the window.

To get a character without blocking use:

int ch = w->getch();

The value -1 is returned if there were no characters pending. A lazy way to block until a character is received, can be done thusly:

int ch = w->readch();

See the header file include/window.hpp for the full Window API. It provides normal windows, border windows and the ability to create subwindows within a window, for display safety.

Attributes:

Attributes are selected through characters, as shown in the following table

Char    Curses Macro Used Internally
'N',    A_NORMAL        // Normal display (no highlight)
'S',    A_STANDOUT      // Best highlighting mode of the terminal.
'U',    A_UNDERLINE     // Underlining
'R',    A_REVERSE       // Reverse video
'b',    A_BLINK         // Blinking
'D',    A_DIM           // Half bright
'B',    A_BOLD          // Extra bright or bold
'A',    A_ALTCHARSET    // Alternate character set

This arrangement allows you to conveniently set several attributes at once:

w->attr_on("RbB");      // Enable Reverse, Blink and Bold
...
w->attr_off("bB");      // Disable Blink and Bold

Graphics Characters:

A limited set of graphic characters are supported through the addgrstr() method. The following code draws a window with panes:

w->move(12,10).addgrstr("L--T--R");
w->move(13,10).addgrstr("|  |  |");
w->move(14,10).addgrstr("t--+--u");
w->move(15,10).addgrstr("|  |  |");
w->move(16,10).addgrstr("l--B--r");

Chaining:

Many of the Windows methods return a reference to "self", so that several operations can be chained. An example of this was shown above for setting graphics.

w->move(16,10).addgrstr("l--B--r");

is equivalent to:

w->move(16,10);
w->addgrstr("l--B--r");

Build:

To build the library, do:

$ make

This creates libcppcurses.a, which can be statically linked against.

To install set your PREFIX and make install:

$ PREFIX=/usr/local make install

Once Installed:

Set your Makefile so that include files will be pulled from $(PREFIX)/include:

#include <cppcurses/cppcurses.hpp>

This will automatically include <cppcurses/window.hpp>.

Grotty Example Program

The grotty test program main.cpp tests some minimal functionality. Type

make main (or make example)

and run it:

./main

Just press a key to advance beyond the current program state. Source code is in main.cpp.

Spelling Note:

Yes, the spelling of "color" is "colour" in Canada, eh? If this offends you, fork the repo and change it.

ve3wwg / cppcurses