Project proposal, CTK

[John Smith]

I have an idea for a project (called "CTK") that I would like to embark. I 
have just started it. Let me know if it's already "taken". Else, I would 
like for people with more experience than myself to help me out.

The idea is to create a curses-based, event-driven, object-oriented widget 
set (ran out of buzzwords). In essence a mix of ncurses, GTK+ and CDK.

Those familiar with GTK+ will know that GLib which is part of GTK+ have 
nothing to do with X11 but can be used for other projects. GLib provides 
among other things one of the better available main loops, a sophisticated 
type and object framework for building object structures (complete with 
inheritance and polymorphism) a signal system, portability wrappers, a host 
of data structures, etc. GTK+ consists of three parts: GTK+, GDK and GLIb. 
These correspond in CTK to: CTK (~GTK+), ncurses (~GDK) and GLib.

CDK is a great toolkit as I see it. But I found it cumbersome to use and 
extend. The problem is that you "execute" the widgets so that processing is 
in one widget at a time. CTK would work asynchronously, like a regular 
Window based application: processing is in a main loop which constantly 
waits to receive events (keypresses, mouseclicks, etc.) which it then 
forwards to the appropriate widgets. It should also be easy to extend it, by 
subclassing existing widgets.

In X programming the X server generates events which are forwarded to the 
appropriate client (application). In CTK you would probably not run several 
apps in one terminal window so it is perhaps better to just let the event 
source be inside the application in a separate thread. In any case that is 
what I've tried so far. I created an input-thread in the application which 
constantly waits to receive keypresses from the root window.  In the main 
thread the program just sits and waits for keypress events from the 
input-thread. So far it's not doing any more magic than this, but it showes 
that this could work.

It would be great if anybody would join in the efforts, since my experience 
is limited. It would be especially nice if someone with experience from CDK 
would join, since it would be nice if we could take all the good stuff from 
CDK and convert it.

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