Ncurses 6.3 Released With Experimental Windows Terminal Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ncurses 6.3 Released With Experimental Windows Terminal Driver

A new version of the Ncurses text-based user interface library is now available and most notable is a new but experimental driver for supporting the Windows Terminal...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ncurses-6.3

[uid313]

Windows Terminal is really nice, it is hardware accelerated too via DirectWrite.

[dragorth]

Windows Terminal is really nice, it is hardware accelerated too via DirectWrite.

Windows Terminal is better than what was available on Windows before. It does use DirectWrite, which can use Hardware Acceleration for font rendering. It, currently, doesn't process text very fast. There is now work on cache the font rendering, inspired in part by Casey Muratori's RefTerm proving to the devs it could be done.

https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99dKzubvpKE&t=3s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgoetgxecw8

[waxhead]

My wet dream is for ncurses to get a graphical GUI wrapper. So that one could choose between GUI and glorious TUI on the fly.

[kpedersen]

This might be the beginning of getting a tmux on Win32!

I hashed together this "thing" (https://github.com/osen/vimux) in order to achieve similar results.

It is very annoying having to SSH into a Windows machine, only to have to SSH in again if you need access to more than one terminal (y'know, for multi-tasking because Windows conhost doesn't even have job control).

Having a "tabbed" Command Prompt was a sloppy workaround and doesn't work for this use-case. Unfortunately the Windows developers don't quite understand the difference and limitations.

[acobar]

This might be the beginning of getting a tmux on Win32!

I hashed together this "thing" (https://github.com/osen/vimux) in order to achieve similar results.

It is very annoying having to SSH into a Windows machine, only to have to SSH in again if you need access to more than one terminal (y'know, for multi-tasking because Windows conhost doesn't even have job control).

Having a "tabbed" Command Prompt was a sloppy workaround and doesn't work for this use-case. Unfortunately the Windows developers don't quite understand the difference and limitations.

Why don't you use git for windows and build upon it?
- https://github.com/git-for-windows/git (it uses https://github.com/mintty/mintty as terminal);
- grab packages from msys2 project related to tmux and ssh, put on git-for-windows path and you will get what you want, tmux working on Windows with ssh on terminal;
- I think it works with both chocolatey and msys2 (msys2 uses pacman, what is nice to install whatever you want and have the dependencies resolved);
- also, take a look on https://github.com/mintty/wsltty.git.

May you need some directions, ask.

Cheers.

[S.Pam]

Is there a way to use bash/shell scripting with ncurses for simple tui rendering?

[kpedersen]

Why don't you use git for windows and build upon it?
May you need some directions, ask.

Thanks for the suggestion. The issue is if I SSH into Windows machines. GitForWindow's mintty terminal can't really help here because my SSH connection has connected me to the basic Windows "shell". This offers no terminal multiplexer (natively).

Yes, what I could do is set up a Cygwin SSHd (or Msys2 SSHd with some fiddling) and use that. However this is not really a "Windows" environment anymore. It is often preferable to test software on as close to the Vanilla out-of-the-box install as possible.

[poncho524]

Speaking of Ncurses, does anyone know of a good resource to learn it?

I've tried the basic doc's but its pretty basic and doesn't really explain the API well.

Tips?