From: Tobias Peters <tpeters@...>
Date: 2004-11-05T07:53:43+09:00
Subject: Re: curses and the ACS_* chars

Markus Koenig wrote:
> I recently did some Curses programming (for the Sokoban Quiz) when I
> found that the 'curses' extension does not include the ACS_* constants
> which would have been very useful (see `man curs_addch`).
> 
> Because I decided not to use only ASCII (that looked a bit strange)
> I created my own extension, 'curses_acs'. Below is the source of it.
> Could that please be included in the standard 'curses' extension? Matz?

Maybe it is not as simple as that.

The ncurses C library provides macros starting with ACS_ which are not 
constants, their value depends on the terminal in use. Thus, they should 
not be used before initscr() has been called. The set_term() function 
will also change the values returned by the ACS_ macros.

The ncurses-ruby bindings (http://ncurses-ruby.berlios.de/) provide 
access to ACS_ macros: Constants of the Ncurses module are initialized 
during the Ncurses.initscr call, while ACS_ macros for terminals opened 
via Ncurses.newterm can be accessed as instance methods of Ncurses::SCREEN.

Tobias