Re: ncurses or slang

[Thomas Dickey <dickey his com>]

On Thu, 24 Sep 2009, Slava Zanko wrote:

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> 24.09.2009 00:37, Thomas Dickey wrote:
>
> Thomas, hi. Glad to see you in this maillist.
>
> > > Preferred to S-Lang (as default), but Ncurses fully supported too.
> > >
> > > With NCurses we have some restrictions (like trouble with drawing of
> > > double lines for boxes). S-Lang is a more powerfull library.
> > not really (just lack of developers for MC that happen to know both
> > libraries)
>
> Well... Drawing double lines possible in NCurses via tty_print_string()
> function (not via hline() vline() and etc). In this case we (side of mc)
> must take care of user encoding, terminal type and used current font. If
> we use hline or vline functions (like now) then this headache of NCurses.
>
> Now Midnight Commander (from git) have initial support of skins.
> Possible to change drawing of lines via skin-file. With Ncurses library
> we used vline, hline and ACS_* constants, therefore double lines not
> drawing, but lines look good with any codepage of user. With S-Lang
> library we used anoter way (in opposite): draw lines directly via
> SLsmg_write_char. As result: we have any UTF-8 lines but we have trouble
> in one-byte codepages ('LANG=C mc' or 'LANG=POSIX mc' show this trouble
> as well).

All that sounds just like you're using slang's equivalent of add_wch() or 
addch(), which you can already do with ncurses.  (Either way, the solution 
depends on locale and terminal support ;-)

The one-byte codepages providing double-lines aren't available in POSIX 
locale.  ncurses has a use_legacy_coding() function to tell it that the 
display can show characters which the locale says aren't printable (though 
mixing that with a UTF-8 locale may not give good results).

--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net