Boxbrain

Pure Perl 6 command-line GUI library

History

At first I thought I might try writing a NativeCall wrapper around ncurses. Then I realized that there is absolutely no reason to fight a C library which has mostly bolted on Unicode when I can do it in Pure Perl 6, with native Unicode goodness.

Concept

(This code is currently alpha, so a concept statement seems important. If anyone feels like seeing pieces of this come true sooner rather than later, patches are more than welcome.)

Boxbrain hopes to be the first plug-and-play async command line display surface. Utilizing terminal-specific escape sequences carefully garnered from the tput command, the Terminal::Print family (currently implemented only here) will be brought in as a role. This should allow transparent support when shifting between xterm or tmux, for instance.

Hopeful syntax:

boxbrain --external-config monitors.json

The config would provide an array of settings hashes: { base-url, key?, query, sync-closure?, sync-trigger, geometry }. The geometry setting can be an ad-hoc details hash or provide a lookup key for the optional top-level details structure.

A failure to apportion your geometry correctly will be considered a user error, as Perl 6 has native rationals :)

Usage

Right now it only provides a grid with some nice access semantics.

my $screen = Boxbrain.new; $screen[9][23] = "%"; # prints the escape sequence to put '%' on line 9 column 23 $screen[9][23]; # returns "%"

$screen(9,23,"%"); # another way, designed for golfing. there should be a whole sub-module to support golfing (hello, enum)

(Note that these are subject to change as the library more fully develops).

But the idea is that in the long-term you will be able to specify views either programmatically or through a JSON structure. These views will support async updates from whatever sources one might desire, allowing for quick hacking together of different "command center"-style scripts.

But if you want to see a pretty display of hearts filling your terminal, just perl6 Boxbrain.pm and enjoy. (Even more fun if you set your font size really small ;) ).

TODO

• Currently this code contains another module, Terminal::Print, that should really be spun off into it's own library. (I also need to convince tadzik that he should move Term::ANSIColor to the Terminal namespace, as Term could be a useful namespace for, erm, terms).