The CURSED Package

The cursed package adds a subclass of the output-pane element in LispWorks' CAPI. It's designed to allow for simple, console-style display of text, but within a graphical pane.

Quickstart

You can immediately start using the cursed-pane by just containing one.

CL-USER > (setf c (capi:contain (make-instance 'cursed-pane)))
#<CURSED-PANE  21C83D3B>

Once the pane is up, you can use all of the Common Lisp printing and formatting functions to render text to the pane (it is a character output stream also!).

CL-USER > (princ "Hello, world!" c)
"Hello, world!"

CL-USER > (force-output c)
NIL

You can use the cursed-pane-cursor-x and cursed-pane-cursor-y accessor methods to setf the cursor position. You can also use the Common Lisp file-position function.

CL-USER > (file-position c)
(13 0)

CL-USER > (file-position c '(20 10))

CL-USER > (format c "[~{~a~^, ~}]" '(this is a test))
NIL

CL-USER > (force-output c)
NIL

The cursor can also be toggled on and off with the cursed-pane-cursor-visible-p accessor.

You can use the with-output-to-cursed-pane macro to quickly position the cursor, render, and force output. The macro will also allow you to temporarily change the foreground and background colors of the pane as well.

CL-USER > (with-output-to-cursed-pane (c :x 0 :y 20 :foreground :yellow :background :blue)
            (loop for i from 1 to 10 do (print (* i i))))
NIL

The above example shows that the cursed pane will also scroll. There is no history, however. You can force the pane to scroll a single line using cursed-pane-scroll.

It is also possible to completely clear the pane with cursed-pane-clear. This will also re-position the cursor back to <0,0>.

It is possible to use the mouse when cursed-pane-selection-visible-p is set the T to select regions of the pane. The selection can also be inspected and adjusted with cursed-pane-selection-start and cursed-pane-selection-end (both are setf-able). These are set similarly to file-position.

The selection can be copied to the clipboard with cursed-pane-copy. Note, however, that newlines are not tracked so a block of text is what will be in the clipboard.

Text from the clipboard can be pasted into the pane with cursed-pane-paste.