Re: ncurses and DOS/Windows

[Mark Hessling]

On Tue, 28 Nov 2000, Alan Meyer wrote:

> As far as I know, ncurses is not now and is unlikely to be available 
> for DOS, though there is a Win32 version in the Cygwin package.
> 
> However, you may be able to use PDCurses, another freeware, open 
> source curses package which is available for DOS.

Actually PDCurses is Public Domain rather than freeware, although some portions
of it (the native X11 code) is Copyright by me.

> 
> Here's one link for it that I found on the net:
> 

This is the PDCurses home page.

>    http://www.lightlink.com/hessling/PDCurses/
> 
> I have no experience in curses programming.  The other posters on 
> this list can give you vastly more authoritative information.  But I 
> am also interested in building an application that runs portably on 
> UNIX, Linux, Windows, DOS, and possibly other environments.  My hope 
> is that I can use a common subset of both pdcurses (for DOS and 

That's  what I do with THE; my text editor. It runs on DOS, OS/2, Windows and
X11 with PDCurses, and text-mode Unix, BeOS, QNX, Amiga with ncurses.

> Windows) and ncurses (for Linux and UNIX) that will require only some 
> very small conditional compilation statements in my code to enable it 
> to compile without modification using either package.

PDCurses and ncurses complement each other reasonably well.  As mentioned
above, PDCurses is also available for X11. This enables you to make a couple
of minor changes to your code and end up with a native X11 application.

> 
> I don't know if that will actually work, and by the time I get around 
> to doing it I might give up DOS and do the whole thing in Java.
> 
> Good luck.
> --
> Alan Meyer
> AM Systems, Inc.
> Randallstown, MD USA
> address@hidden
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Bug-ncurses mailing list
> address@hidden
> http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-ncurses
> 

Cheers, Mark
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Mark Hessling,  address@hidden  http://www.lightlink.com/hessling/
* Author of THE; a Free XEDIT/KEDIT editor, Rexx/SQL, Rexx/Curses, Rexx/Wrapper
* Maintainer of PDCurses: Public Domain Curses and, Regina Rexx interpreter
* Use Rexx? join the Rexx Language Association: http://www.rexxla.org