Re: utf8 patch for mc, slang 2 version

[Bart Oldeman <bartoldeman users sourceforge net>]

On Thu, 15 Jun 2006, Egmont Koblinger wrote:

> Anyway, there are plenty of apps (e.g. vim, joe) that perfectly support
> UTF-8 and use ncurses (not the w version). I wonder how it is possible...

Because they only use the terminfo (low-level) parts of ncurses, see "man 
3ncurses terminfo". Those parts do not care about UTF-8.

MC uses a higher level part of ncurses (the display routines), but 
restricted to "stdscr".

There's an even higher level part of ncurses that supports managing
(overlapping) windows, but MC does not use it. SLang (without the newt 
library) does not support that. So one advantage of using ncurses over 
slang is that MC could make use of ncurses' windowing code, thereby 
simplifying its own code. In the way that MC uses SLang and ncurses 
right now there is very little difference between the two libraries.

If you google (groups) for it (Miguel's posts) you'll find that around 
'95/'96 SLang was preferred over ncurses because it was faster, smaller, 
and less buggy. But that is no longer the case, there is not much 
difference now.

Bart