[Chicken-users] New user-interface egg: slang.egg

[Tony Sidaway]

S-Lang (also known as slang or SLang, I'll call it slang from now on)
is a very well established, well supported, text-based user interface.
John E. Davis used slang to produce his "slrn" Usenet newsreader and
the JED text editor, and the "mutt" mailer and "lynx" web browser also
use slang's display routines.

Slang's display routines are somewhat simpler than ncurses, but I
think they benefit from that. They're pretty reliable and easy to use.
Their use in a number of popular and reliable free software products
shows that it's a popular choice for programmers.

I've wrapped many of this library's display and keyboard control
routines in a new egg, slang.egg.  Obviously you need to install Slang
to use it:

http://www.s-lang.org/

There isn't much in the way of documentation yet, but I've written an
adaptation of the pager.c example and placed it in the slang-examples
directory that is distributed with the egg.

This is part of my project to produce a source-level debugger for
Chicken.  Rather than choose a graphical user interface which would
lock out a lot of potential users, I'm going for the lowest common
denominator.  Any system that can emulate a VT100 terminal should be
able to run a program that uses the slang library, it's fairly easy to
install and needs no special configuration.  I plan to write the
debugger display system to use a plugin display module, so that the
same debugger can be adapted to many different user interfaces,
whether graphical of textual, with their own representations of the
same basic information.