Re: [Qemu-devel] qemu curses driver

[Johannes Schindelin]

Hi,

On Sat, 10 Dec 2005, andrzej zaborowski wrote:

> I made this simple curses/ncurses interface for qemu. If anyone is
> interested in using it, I attach a patch, relative to CVS version from
> some two days ago. I think it is also safe to apply to the CVS, if you
> think this is a useful addition (which I think it is). I tried to make
> it rather portable, but I've only been able to test it on Linux and
> FreeBSD i386 (only ncurses) so I suppose it works on all unix, but I
> have no idea how ms windows would deal with it. There's a curses
> implementation for windows called PDcurses and it should be fine, but
> if the "configure" doesn't detect any curses library on the system, it
> will just compile without the curses driver, like if it wasn't there.

Wow. That's cool! I just tested it and it works great!

A few questions:

- why do you enable it only if the target cpu is i386?
- is it possible to scroll inside the window?
  (I started qemu in a 80x24 window, but the guest expected 80x25, so I 
   could not see the last line)
- any reason the Escape key does not work?

> The qemu consoles work just like with the SDL interface, except you
> switch them with Alt+Number instead of Ctrl+Alt+Number because ncurses
> doesn't detect Ctrl and Alt keys together. So usually the virtual
> machine screen is at Alt+1, the qemu console at Alt+2, serial console
> at Alt+3 and parallel console at Alt+4.

Is it not possible to have the same key binding?

> Resizing the terminal (like when resizing the xterm window) is handled
> (at least with ncurses, this may not be implemented in other curses
> libraries).

I have ncurses installed and it did not work. Have to investigate.

> I hope this is useful,

It sure is! Finally I can run qemu instances inside screen!

Ciao,
Dscho