This project has been archived and is not maintained

SwiftNCurses

Swift bindings to the ncurses library

MacOS Notes

ncurses official page https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses.faq.html

The Darwin Module already comes shipped with a version of ncurses, but is terribly out of date (version 5.8 at last check) and a major cause of headaches. Since basically every other package will touch Foundation when trying to compile with an alternate version of ncurses the compiler complains that headers for ncurses have already been imported. The solution (found here https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56251835/swift-package-manager-unable-to-compile-ncurses-installed-through-homebrew) is to do the following:

1. copy all headers from the homebrew keg

   cp -r /usr/local/Cellar/ncurses/6.1/include Sources/Cncurses/include

   Replace all occurrences of __NCURSES_H with __CNCURSES_H

2. find . -name '*.h' -exec sed -i '' 's/__NCURSES_H/__CNCURSES_H/g' {} \; h' -exec sed -i '' -E -e "s/<(.*(find . -name '*.h' -exec basename {} ; | paste -sd "|" -))>/\"\1\"/g" {} \;

3. Tell the compiler to ignore the headers provided by MacOS -Xcc -D__NCURSES_H

This still leads to a downstream problem of subsequent packages/ executables having to pass the same compiler directive to get things to run though...need a better fix

// related post ardagnir/athame#53 __sighandler_t (on Linux) is not available on MacOS. A compiler directive was added in Curses.swift changing to the type alias to sig_t

subwindows

Subwindows (methods such as subwin, derwin, mvderwin, wsyncup, wsyncdown, wcursyncup, syncok) are reported to be unstable per the man pages and as such are not implemented. Additionally, they add another level of complexity for the user beyond the current scope of the project.

color table

• only 256 color pairs are supported as text attributes are OR'd using the older curses API. see notes in the man pages for curs_attr. https://www.ditig.com/256-colors-cheat-sheet

Wide Character support

SwiftNCurses supports wide characters, but there are a few caveots and notes for end users.

• Most emojis and Unicode characters will display without any issues, but be aware that unicode characters composed of multiple code points (grapheme clusters) won't display properly.

• although SwiftNCurses is linked with the wide curses library (ncursesw), none of the wide character support API is utilized at this time. The wide character API more complicated and most users are not likely to need the additional support it provides.

• wikipedia entry on wide characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_character

• Some useful notes on getting ncursesw http://dillingers.com/blog/2014/08/10/ncursesw-and-unicode/

menu notes

more sources for using curses on mac

https://forums.swift.org/t/ncurses-on-linux-with-swift/16913