>All I am trying to do is get a CWorthy style interface up on Linux for
>all the Netware NDS and NWFS Utils and such. On a standard PC, this is
>pretty easy to do with NT, DOS, NetWare, and WIn95/98. I've got a
>single source Lib that handles all of them for CWorthy -- For the DOS
>version, it's direct screen writes, for NT the Console Text APIs, and
>for Linux it's (n)curses, except Linux has the poorest look and feel of
>the three because the default for these shells don't let you use all
>ASCII charaters to make cool little boxes and such without a lot of work
>and research into how shells work.
Having never touched ncurses before, the first time I used it, I
was overwhelmed by its non-intuitiveness and overcomplexity, as
well as lack of features I deem critical and necessary but which
are mostly available as addon components which also complicate
the interface. Namespace is horrible in ncurses AFAIC. However
one thing that I did do, was get line drawing characters working
the first time. I did NOTHING special to achieve this.
I did find that when I changed my console font, that my line
drawing was toast. It was also toast in midnight commander. The
shell had (has?) absolutely nothing to do with it. Read the
documentation for the console tools. A default installed RedHat
system, works nicely. If you play with fonts, or keyboard
mappings, etc.. you may end up hosing the line drawing stuff.
Keep in mind that line drawing characters are NOT ASCII AT ALL,
and are charset dependant. Not everyone uses the same charset
either.
The only way that I know of to FORCE the issue, and it may not
even work - is to write to the RAW vcsa devices. RHIDE does this
I believe. You may need to implement a backwards compatibility
feature using "+" and "-", "|" characters for line drawing as
well.
>Again, the point that is missed is that for all you "unix hacker guru
>types" having to do "set meta-on" an such in a /.inputrc file may not be
>a big deal, but end user customers are lazy and don't want to do a weeks
>worth of research just to get their displays to look like what they are
>used to with NetWare, DOS, NT, Windows 95/98, etc.
The average end user customer is going to want a GUI point and
click interface with no text mode anyways. If you want to
implement what you're looking for, I suggest looking at software
that DOES IT ALLREADY. Midnight commander, and several other
curses programs illustrate this allready.
>I know you guys think I'm anal here or something, but I am
>trying to make this easy for our folks who will buy a Caldera
>or RedHat commercial Linux and the stuff just works without the
>user needing to do all this extra stuff to get what they can
>get "free and easy" from Microsoft and Novell (like simple text
>graphics support for utilities).
RTFM then, and quit whining. You'll get much further with honey,
than with guns. You'll also get much further along if you post
this to an appropriate UNIX programming list rather than the
kernel list, as it has absolutely nothing at all whatsoever to do
with the kernel.
-- Mike A. Harris Linux advocate Computer Consultant GNU advocate Capslock Consulting Open Source advocateJoin the FreeMWare project - the goal to produce a FREE program in which you can run Windows 95/98/NT, and other operating systems.
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