Wolf Curses

Provides an abstraction of one or more windows that maps onto the console. Each window is represented by a character matrix. The programmer sets up each window to look as they want the display to look, and then tells wolf curses to update the screen. The library determines a minimal set of changes needed to update the display and then executes these using the terminal's specific capabilities and control sequences.

In short, this means that the programmer simply creates a character matrix of how the screen should look and lets wolf curses handle the work.

Contains example implementation of a console application using the Wolf curses library. A menu is displayed with a list of choices the user can make.

Fork this repository and use it as the base for your next application or just look at the code and cherry pick from it as you please.

NuGet Package

To install Wolf Curses, run the following command in the Package Manager Console. If you would like to see the NuGet gallery page you can find it here.

PM> Install-Package WolfCurses

Cloning Instructions

git clone --recursive https://github.com/Maxwolf/WolfCurses.git

Make sure your git client recursively grabs all the sub-modules for the repo. Most Git GUI's (e.g, SourceTree, SmartGit, GitEye) will all do this automatically for you.

Compilation Instructions

You should be able to run the Cake build script by invoking the bootstrapper with a script tailored to the target platform.

Example Implementation

You can find an example implementation of the WolfCurses library being used with a simple console application with a few different menus, windows, and forms. The source code can be found here.

Windows

build.bat

If script execution fail due to the execution policy, you might have to tell PowerShell to allow running scripts. You do this by changing the execution policy.

Linux/OS X

bash build.sh

Purpose

The purpose of this project was to replicate the concept of the curses library created by Ken Arnold and originally released with BSD UNIX, where it was used for several games, most notably Rogue.

Curses-based software

The original curses project was designed to facilitate GUI-like functionality on a text-only device, such as a PC running in console mode, a hardware ANSI terminal, a Telnet or SSH client, or similar.

Curses-based programs often have a user interface that resembles a traditional graphical user interface, including 'widgets' such as text boxes and scrollable lists, rather than the command line interface (CLI) most commonly found on text-only devices. This can make them more user-friendly than a CLI-based program, while still being able to run on text-only devices. Curses-based software can also have a lighter resource footprint and operate on a wider range of systems (both in terms of hardware and software) than their GUI-based counterparts. This includes old pre-1990 machines along with modern embedded systems using text-only displays.

However, not all Curses-based software employs a text user interface which resembles a graphical user interface. One counterexample would be the popular vi text editor, which while not being CLI-based, uses memorized keyboard commands almost exclusively, rather than the prompting TUI/GUI style, which relies more on recognition than recall.

Curses is most commonly associated with Unix-like operating systems, although implementations for Microsoft Windows also exist.

History

There are several other projects that have come after curses such as pcurses, PDCurses, and more recently ncurses which is used by most Linux text-mode installers to this day (2016 time of writing).

I am not affiliated with these other projects at all. I wanted to re-imagine these libraries for modern object-oriented languages without using a wrapper.