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Which Text-Based UI Do You Code With?

Posted by Cliff on from the ain't-nothin'-wrong-wit-curses dept.

JHWH asks: "I've been asked to design and implement a management software system with text based user interface as the replacement of an older one running on AS/400. Despite my attempts towards a web UI, the customer is actually willing to have a text based UI. The main reasons are the need for a very low bandwidth and the ability to run on serial terminals. All this in the 21st century! Host systems will be Linux, the language will be C or C++. I already thought about the use of text based browsers like lynx or links. So now I have to wipe the dust away from my ncurses manual, or can Slashdot suggest something more effective?"

2 of 211 comments (clear)

  1. SLANG by goarilla · · Score: 4, Interesting

    somebody in ##slackware on freenode
    once recommended me to try using the slang API
    instead of (n)curses based on the fact that he bought a ncurses book
    and it sucked monkeyballs and programming ncurses is not really intuitive
    some of the other fine folk who regularly sit idle in that channel
    also said that if it could be done in a Shell script
    you could try using shell and dialog which is a ncurses based program btw
    this could obviously be a biased opinion from slackers since the pkgtools in slackware http://www.slackware.com/ are written this way
    and they have served us fine for many years
    and will continue to serve us happily for many more years to come.

    anyway good luck

  2. Re:What's wrong with ncurses? by SnarfQuest · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Just write ansi escape sequences to the screen

    And you will then discover some of the reasons why you should have used ncurses in the first place:

    1. Does the cursor jump to the next line when you hit the 80th column?
    2. If you type a character in the lower right corner, does it scroll up the screen?
    3. Are they going to bring in some non-ansi terminals and expect you to make them all work?
    4. Which subset of the ansi sequences are going to be available? Using xterm, gnome-terminal, putty, ansi.sys, ...? Which version? They all support different subsets/extensions of the "standard", and have different bugs.
    5. What other intresting "bugs" in all the possible terminals do you need to work around?

    I'd rather use a library that already handles all the crap.

    --
    Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.