From: Josh Cheek <josh.cheek@...>
Date: 2011-09-26T12:40:22+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] ffi-ncurses v0.4.0 released

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On Sun, Sep 25, 2011 at 5:25 PM, Sean O'Halpin <sean.ohalpin@gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm pleased to announce version 0.4.0 of the ffi-ncurses gem which
> provides an FFI wrapper to the ncursesw library for creating
> fullscreen terminal applications with cursor positioning, colour and
> text windows.
>
> This release has much better support for Unicode (aka widechars) both
> on input and output and fully implements the ncursesw widechar
> routines. It has been tested on Ubuntu 10.04 and 11.04 with MRI 1.8.7,
> 1.9.2 and jruby-head in 1.8.7 and 1.9.2 modes. A previous version was
> tested on Mac OS X 10.4 - this version should still work but I have
> not been able to test it yet.
>
> It also contains some more substantial examples, in particular
> showing how to handle Unicode input (in examples/getkey.rb), how to
> temporarily leaves ncurses (examples/temp_leave.rb) and how to use
> pads and popup windows (examples/viewer.rb).
>
> I've tried to retain backward compatibility for those libraries that
> depend on it but if I've missed something, please let me know on the
> github issues page (https://github.com/seanohalpin/ffi-ncurses/issues).
>
> To install:
>
>  $ [sudo] gem install ffi-ncurses
>
> To run the examples, change to a scratch directory then
>
>  $ gem unpack ffi-ncurses
>  $ cd ffi-ncurses-0.4.0/examples
>  $ ./run-all.sh
>
> Main Changes
> ------------
>
> * Uses the ncursesw (widechar) version of ncurses by default.
>
> * Supports all functions in ncursesw except the =vwprintw/vwscanw=
>  family.
>
> * Added =ACS= constants (box characters). See =examples/acs.rb= and
>  =examples/wacs.rb=.
>
> * Added support for =libpanelw=. See =examples/panel_simple.rb=.
>
> * Methods with boolean arguments now accept =true= or =false= as well
>  as 1 or 0.
>
> * Better examples. See =examples/viewer.rb= for a simple but complete
>  file viewing application.
>
> * Sets the locale (using FFI::Locale.setlocale(LC_ALL, "")) in ruby
>  1.8.x to enable UTF-8 input. This adds a dependency on the
>  ffi-locale gem. See =examples/getkey.rb= to see how to distinguish
>  between function keys and Unicode characters.
>
> * Start of a compatibility layer for the existing C extension-based
>  Ncurses Ruby libraries - require 'ffi-ncurses/ncurses'.  Runs all
>  the examples from ncurses-ruby without changes (except those relying
>  on menus and forms). See =examples/ncurses/*.rb=.
>
> Source code available at https://github.com/seanohalpin/ffi-ncurses/.
>
> Regards,
> Sean
>
>
This is really cool :)

Could you add an example with nonblocking input? (ie for a game loop that
gets input from user but continues playing even if user doesn't do anything)
I don't seem to be able to figure out how to do it, my efforts were based on
threads like this:


require 'ffi-ncurses'
include FFI::NCurses

begin
  initscr
  raw
  keypad stdscr, true
  noecho
  curs_set 0
  ch = 0

  key_getter = Thread.new do
    while ch != KEY_CTRL_Q
      ch = getch
      addstr "You pressed #{ch}\n"
      refresh
    end
  end

  1.upto 5 do |i|
    sleep 1
    addstr "Running for #{i} seconds\n"
  end

  key_getter.kill

ensure
  endwin
end








This approach works for the equivalent gets/puts:

line = ""
line_getter = Thread.new do
  while line != "quit\n"
    line = gets
    puts "You wrote #{line}\n"
  end
end

1.upto 5 do |i|
  sleep 1
  puts "Running for #{i} seconds\n"
end

line_getter.kill

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