[HN Gopher] Hacking the planet with Notcurses: a guide to TUIs (... ___________________________________________________________________ Hacking the planet with Notcurses: a guide to TUIs (2020) [pdf] Author : Tomte Score : 76 points Date : 2021-12-05 17:26 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (nick-black.com) (TXT) w3m dump (nick-black.com) | nickdothutton wrote: | We have to go back. | marcodiego wrote: | Curses and notcurses have their place but I still miss the | simplicity of borland's conio.h implementation. Also remember | that visual basic was initially written for DOS. Having a open | source multiplatform text mode visual basic would be interesting. | michaelsbradley wrote: | Not exactly what you're describing, but check out Final Cut: | https://github.com/gansm/finalcut | marcodiego wrote: | Screenshot are cool! I remember someone had maintained the | open source implementation of turbo vision. I don't hear | about it for a long time, so I think it was abandoned and it | had to make a few changes to workaround turbo vision | unsafeness. This one seems cool! | michaelsbradley wrote: | A modern port of Turbo Vision 2.0: | https://github.com/magiblot/tvision | cout wrote: | AFAIK vbdos came after the Windows version. It was fun to play | with but a little slow. | entelechy0 wrote: | TIL of notcurses | | "Notcurses is licensed under Apache2, a demonstration that I have | transcended your petty world of material goods, fiat currencies, | and closed sources. Implement Microsoft Bob in it. Charge rubes | for it. Put it in your ballistic missiles so that you have a nice | LED display of said missile's speed and projected yield; right | before impact, scroll "FUCK YOU" in all the world's languages, | and close it out with a smart palette fade. Carve the compiled | objects onto bricks and mail them to Richard Stallman, taunting | him through a bullhorn as you do so." | | This inspires me | michaelsbradley wrote: | The author of Notcurses released version 3.0.0 several days ago, | a ton of work went into that! | | https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/releases/tag/v3.0.... | gadrev wrote: | Ok, if you're looking into notcurses, you may want to watch this: | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcjkezf1ARY (~ 6') | | the WTF effect that video had on me lasted quite a while. | | I still can't describe it. | actually_a_dog wrote: | Nice! This really makes me want to play with notcurses. :) BTW, | did you notice the image of a coronavirus in there? | gorgoiler wrote: | Happy was the day I gave up on curses and just started splatting | crap at the terminal with my own control codes. | | For too long did I think that curses was the one and only way to | do anything with a terminal. | akkartik wrote: | From page 8: | | _" We don't switch from blue to some other specified color, | because we don't know the background color of the terminal. Some | people, possibly aliens, don't favor a dark terminal background. | If the terminal background were white, and we had just used e.g. | ncdirect_fg(n, 0xffffff), text following "house" would be | invisible._ | | _" One might observe that a user with a blue background will | have invisible "house" text. This is a real issue, one lacking a | perfect solution. It is not generally possible to discover the | RGB values of the default colors. I suppose all one can do is | rest easy, serene in the belief that white backgrounds are one | thing, but people with chromatic backgrounds deserve whatever | happens to them."_ | | That's a lot of cognitive dissonance in a work about UI design. | Let's try to do better in making TUIs mainstream. That requires | encouraging people to use the few features terminals _do_ | provide. Like chromatic backgrounds. | | I've been doing a fair amount of ncurses hacking recently[1], and | I prefer to always explicitly specify colors. People won't get | their preferred colors by default, but they'll always get a | legible configuration by default. | | [1] https://github.com/akkartik/teliva | paulryanrogers wrote: | This same problem has plagued the web for decades. I used to | change default colors to ease my eyes, and whenever foreground | CSS lacked a background color it often became impossible to | read. Accessibility modes came soon after but were too binary | for me. | | These days we have dark modes and more elaborate extensions. | Still sometimes things don't align. | | So thanks for at least specifying both. | akkartik wrote: | Yeah, it's a hard problem, and I liked that OP acknowledged | that. But I liked less how it made a virtue of the bad | situation. There's really no way to rest easy or be serene | here. | ripley12 wrote: | I've been reading this recently to get up to speed with | Notcurses, it's fantastic. Funny, engaging, and a surprisingly | good general overview of how terminals work. | | One thing to note: it was written for an older version of | Notcurses. So some of the details aren't 100% up to date, but it | covers the fundamentals. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-12-05 23:00 UTC)