termo

termo is a library providing an alternative to ncurses' handling of terminal input. ncurses does a really terrible job at that, mainly wrt. mouse support which seems to be utterly broken. If you can drag things in a terminal application, such as in VIM, I can assure you it’s not using ncurses for that. (At least not with ncurses older than 6.0.)

Since terminal I/O is really complicated and full of special cases, this project doesn’t aspire to also replace the output part of ncurses, but is rather complementary to it. In the end it makes use of its terminfo library.

The API isn’t stable yet. Tell me what needs to be done so I can fix it first.

Building and Installing

Build dependencies: cmake >= 2.8.5, pkg-config
Optional dependencies: Unibilium (alternative for curses), GLib (for the demos)

$ git clone https://github.com/pjanouch/termo.git
$ mkdir termo/build
$ cd termo/build
$ cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug

To install the library, you can do either the usual:

# make install

Or you can try telling CMake to make a package for you. For Debian it is:

$ cpack -G DEB
# dpkg -i termo-*.deb

To see the library in action, you can try running the demos, which are statically linked against the library, and hence they can be run as they are:

$ make demos

What’s Different From the Original termkey?

The main change is throwing away any UTF-8 dependent code, making the library capable of handling all unibyte and multibyte encodings supported by iconv on your system. The characters are still presented as Unicode in the end, however, as the other sensible option is wchar_t and that doesn’t really work well, see http://gnu.org/software/libunistring/manual/libunistring.html#The-wchar_005ft-mess

To make the mouse parsing support actually useful, some API has been added to set the proper modes on request, and unset them appropriately while destroying. You can have a look at demo-draw.c for an example.

Another change worth mentioning is the usage of CMake instead of the problematic libtool-based Makefile. Now you can include this project in your other CMake-based projects and simply import the target. No package maintainer action is needed for you to enjoy the benefits of proper terminal input.

The rest is just me going silly over formatting and various unimportant stuff. Oh, and I’ve deleted the manpages. It needs more Doxygen. :) TBD

Contributing and Support

Use this project’s GitHub to report any bugs, request features, or submit pull requests. If you want to discuss this project, or maybe just hang out with the developer, feel free to join me at irc://irc.janouch.name, channel #dev.

License

termo is based on the termkey library, originally written by Paul Evans <leonerd@leonerd.org.uk>, with additional changes made by Přemysl Janouch <p.janouch@gmail.com>.

You may use the software under the terms of the MIT license, the text of which is included within the package, see the file LICENSE.