Notcurses Is Still Alive For Ramping Up "Terminal Bling" With Complex TUIs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Notcurses Is Still Alive For Ramping Up "Terminal Bling" With Complex TUIs

For those wanting to build really nifty and complex text user interfaces (TUIs) for terminal applications, Notcurses is one of the options for maximizing the "terminal bling" with some rather vibrant features that goes well beyond what's offered with the likes of Ncurses. It's been nearly two years since the last release while was surprised today to see out a new version...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Notcurses-3.0.10-Release

[aviallon]

This is so overkill. I love it.

[Jumbotron]

So….when does a TUI actually become a GUI ? I guess Notcurses allows you to find out.

[anolting]

I love all the color and bling and so on, but I don't see a real usage for it. Or I'm wrong when I assume that software need to make usage of the capabilitites of notcurses? Next to the console or terminal application itself?

[bug77]

I love all the color and bling and so on, but I don't see a real usage for it. Or I'm wrong when I assume that software need to make usage of the capabilitites of notcurses? Next to the console or terminal application itself?

You could use it to write a pretty bada$$ Midnight Commander.

[DumbFsck]

I love all the color and bling and so on, but I don't see a real usage for it. Or I'm wrong when I assume that software need to make usage of the capabilitites of notcurses? Next to the console or terminal application itself?

Notcurses is not for the user to have bling in the terminal, it is for the devs of TUI applications to use.

[waxhead]

What i think would have been really nice is if there could have been a wrapper for not/n-curses to gtk/qt/tk/whatever... either a #define GUI or #define TUI or switch on the fly even...

[moonwalker]

You could use it to write a pretty bada$$ Midnight Commander.

Midnight Commander is already pretty badass. Perfection is not when there is nothing left to add, it's when there is nothing left to remove.

[moonwalker]

What i think would have been really nice is if there could have been a wrapper for not/n-curses to gtk/qt/tk/whatever... either a #define GUI or #define TUI or switch on the fly even...

It would be cool, but the problem is that there are a lot of capabilities in GUI that are difficult to impossible to translate into TUI, and vice versa - some features of TUI would be too awkward for GUI. The abstractions necessary would have to expose mostly only the lowest common denominator of capabilities yet will still inevitably leak. It's much easier to, e.g., have library implementing core functionality and separate front-ends for TUI and for various GUIs. If I'm not mistaken, that's what Parted does - there is libparted, and there is a plethora of front-ends: CLI, GParted, KDE Partition Manager, AFAIK GNOME has it's own Parted-based tool too...

[milo_hoffman]

Would be better if there was some useful utility that uses it to play with.