[HN Gopher] Hacking the planet with Notcurses: a guide to TUIs (...
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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.
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(page generated 2021-12-05 23:00 UTC)