Curses for MSDOS

[T.E.Dickey]

Alexander V. Voinov <avv at quasar.ipa.nw.ru> wrote:
> Hi,

> Klaus-Juergen Wolf wrote:

>> Swartz <swartz at erols.com> wrote:
>>  > Is there anything like curses for MS-DOS?  Thanx.
>>
>> I know of PC-Curses. Written in the early 80s. Maybe someone has
>> extended it, but in the state I had seen it had no NCurses extensions
>> and wouldn't work with Python.
>>
>> Probably very few people used it, because that screen access mechanism
>> was relatively slow on MS-DOS.

> I learned that the emulation of curses in SLang
> (ftp://space.mit.edu/pub/davis/slang/) is sometimes even better than the
> original curses, ncurses, etc. I may be valid also for MS-DOS. If you can
> build the SLang library for MS-DOS and link your curses-demanding
> application with it you may have solved your problems.

um.  Not exactly.  The two have comparable performance, and slang's curses
interface differs subtly from the normal curses implementations, so
actually only trivial applications can be ported to it without
modification.

Once in a while I am briefly tempted to do side-by-side comparisons (I have
some programs that work with BSD and SYSV curses), but since slang's curses
imitation is ad hoc - contains only the functions that were necessary for
one or another of the sample programs, then either I'd have to butcher the
program or fill in the gaps in slang's code - and then it still wouldn't
function the same.

PDcurses on the other hand, does implement curses...

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey
dickey at clark.net
http://www.clark.net/pub/dickey