ncurses-idris

A package for interfacing with ncurses from Idris 2 using the c libncurses library.

Dependencies

Packages:

• contrib >= 0.5.1
• indexed >= 0.0.9

System libraries: ncurses >= 5

Building

To install this package, first install the indexed package (or put it in the depends directory of this repo) and then run

make && make install

On some systems, targetting libncurses generically will fail (you'll know when you try to run a program using this Idris package) so you need to build this package for a specific version of libncurses.

Determining what version you have is system dependent, but once you know, you can install this package for a particular version as follows (version 6 in this example):

NCURSES_VERSION=6 make && make install

Usage

This library currently supports relatively low-level access to some but not all NCurses features and somewhat more limited support of the same features via a dependently-typed wrapper. See modules under NCurses for more on low-level access in conjunction with the Text.PrettyPrint.Prettyprinter.Render.NCurses module provided by this package to render Docs with NCurses.Core.Attribute annotations.

The higher level access is provided by the Control.NCurses module and it also supports pretty-printing of Docs via Control.NCurses.Pretty.

You can find an example of low-level use (including pretty-printing of Docs) in examples/doc_ann.

You can find an example of high-level use (including pretty-printing of Docs) in examples/control_curses.

When using low-level access, be sure you initNCurses before doing anything else and be sure you cleanup with deinitNCurses before your program exits.

The following fork by @gallais may pique the interest of anyone looking to experiment with another high level interface to the underlying NCurses functionality: https://github.com/gallais/ncurses-idris

Examples

The package currently supports two high level paradigms: procedural commands or declarative printing of documents via contrib's Prettyprinter.

Procedural

main : IO ()
main = withNCurses $ do
  init
  addColor "green" Green Black
  clear
  setAttr (Color "green")
  putStrLn "Hello in green"
  enableAttr Underline
  putStrLn "and also underlined"
  refresh
  liftIO $ sleep 10
  deinit

Declarative (Prettyprinter)

prettyDoc : Doc (Attribute (Active ["green"]))
prettyDoc = color "green" $
  vsep [ pretty "Hello in green"
       , underline "and also underlined"
       ]

main : IO ()
main = withNCurses $ do
  init
  addColor "green" Green Black
  clear
  printDoc prettyDoc
  refresh
  liftIO $ sleep 10
  deinit