Re: ncurses applications: best practices

[Stephan Beal]

On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 6:49 AM, Sentinel <address@hidden> wrote:
> Just one more for today. (Apologies for using the bugs forum for this
> question).

Hiya!

i can heartily recommend the book "Programmer's Guide to nCurses" by
Dan Gookin, published by Wiley. It's relative new (2007) and is damned
good. And it's the only current book on ncurses. It's missing some
topics (e.g. forms and panels), but it's very, very helpful
nonetheless. Here's a link:

http://www.c-for-dummies.com/ncurses/

> But now I am wondering whether all labels, message fields etc should be form
> fields for better manageability.

That's a nice idea, actually.

> How do you implement navigation. I was unhappy using KEY_UP and DOWN for
> navigation across fields, and using something else for lines. So i use the
> same for lines as well, checking for an error. I first try to move to
> prev/next line, if that fails then i move to next/prev field.

Most apps use Tab (forward) or Shift-Tab (backwards), but many curses
apps unfortunately use the Up/Down arrows (which i don't like).

Happy hacking!

-- 
----- stephan beal
http://wanderinghorse.net/home/stephan/