README
1-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2-- Copyright (c) 1998-2011,2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc. --
3-- --
4-- Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a --
5-- copy of this software and associated documentation files (the --
6-- "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including --
7-- without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, --
8-- distribute, distribute with modifications, sublicense, and/or sell copies --
9-- of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished --
10-- to do so, subject to the following conditions: --
11-- --
12-- The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included --
13-- in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. --
14-- --
15-- THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS --
16-- OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF --
17-- MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN --
18-- NO EVENT SHALL THE ABOVE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, --
19-- DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR --
20-- OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE --
21-- USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. --
22-- --
23-- Except as contained in this notice, the name(s) of the above copyright --
24-- holders shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the --
25-- sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior written --
26-- authorization. --
27-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
28-- $Id: README,v 1.25 2012/08/11 20:11:26 tom Exp $
29-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
30 README file for the ncurses package
31
32See the file ANNOUNCE for a summary of ncurses features and ports.
33See the file INSTALL for instructions on how to build and install ncurses.
34See the file NEWS for a release history and bug-fix notes.
35See the file TO-DO for things that still need doing, including known bugs.
36
37Browse the file misc/ncurses-intro.html for narrative descriptions of how
38to use ncurses and the panel, menu, and form libraries.
39
40Browse the file doc/html/hackguide.html for a tour of the package internals.
41
42ROADMAP AND PACKAGE OVERVIEW:
43
44You should be reading this file in a directory called: ncurses-d.d, where d.d
45is the current version number (see the dist.mk file in this directory for
46that). There should be a number of subdirectories, including `c++', `form',
47`man', `menu', `misc', `ncurses', `panel', `progs', `test', 'tack' and `Ada95'.
48(The 'tack' program may be distributed separately).
49
50A full build/install of this package typically installs several libraries, a
51handful of utilities, and a database hierarchy. Here is an inventory of the
52pieces:
53
54The libraries are:
55
56 libncurses.a (normal)
57 libncurses.so (shared)
58 libncurses_g.a (debug and trace code enabled)
59 libncurses_p.a (profiling enabled)
60
61 libpanel.a (normal)
62 libpanel.so (shared)
63 libpanel_g.a (debug and trace code enabled)
64
65 libmenu.a (normal)
66 libmenu.so (shared)
67 libmenu_g.a (debug enabled)
68
69 libform.a (normal)
70 libform.so (shared)
71 libform_g.a (debug enabled)
72
73If you configure using the --enable-widec option, a "w" is appended to the
74library names (e.g., libncursesw.a), and the resulting libraries support
75wide-characters, e.g., via a UTF-8 locale. The corresponding header files
76are compatible with the non-wide-character configuration; wide-character
77features are provided by ifdef's in the header files. The wide-character
78library interfaces are not binary-compatible with the non-wide-character
79version.
80
81If you configure using the --enable-reentrant option, a "t" is appended to the
82library names (e.g., libncursest.a) and the resulting libraries have a
83different binary interface which makes the ncurses interface more "opaque".
84
85The ncurses libraries implement the curses API. The panel, menu and forms
86libraries implement clones of the SVr4 panel, menu and forms APIs. The source
87code for these lives in the `ncurses', `panel', `menu', and `form' directories
88respectively.
89
90In the `c++' directory, you'll find code that defines an interface to the
91curses, forms, menus and panels library packaged as C++ classes, and a demo program in C++
92to test it. These class definition modules are not installed by the 'make
93install.libs' rule as libncurses++.
94
95In the `Ada95' directory, you'll find code and documentation for an
96Ada95 binding of the curses API, to be used with the GNAT compiler.
97This binding is built by a normal top-level `make' if configure detects
98an usable version of GNAT (3.11 or above). It is not installed automatically.
99See the Ada95 directory for more build and installation instructions and
100for documentation of the binding.
101
102To do its job, the ncurses code needs your terminal type to be set in the
103environment variable TERM (normally set by your OS; under UNIX, getty(1)
104typically does this, but you can override it in your .profile); and, it needs a
105database of terminal descriptions in which to look up your terminal type's
106capabilities.
107
108In older (V7/BSD) versions of curses, the database was a flat text file,
109/etc/termcap; in newer (USG/USL) versions, the database is a hierarchy of
110fast-loading binary description blocks under /usr/lib/terminfo. These binary
111blocks are compiled from an improved editable text representation called
112`terminfo' format (documented in man/terminfo.5). The ncurses library can use
113either /etc/termcap or the compiled binary terminfo blocks, but prefers the
114second form.
115
116In the `misc' directory, there is a text file terminfo.src, in editable
117terminfo format, which can be used to generate the terminfo binaries (that's
118what make install.data does). If the package was built with the
119--enable-termcap option enabled, and the ncurses library cannot find a terminfo
120description for your terminal, it will fall back to the termcap file supplied
121with your system (which the ncurses package installation leaves strictly
122alone).
123
124The utilities are as follows:
125
126 tic -- terminfo source to binary compiler
127 infocmp -- terminfo binary to source decompiler/comparator
128 clear -- emits clear-screen for current terminal
129 tabs -- set tabs on a terminal
130 tput -- shell-script access to terminal capabilities.
131 toe -- table of entries utility
132 tset -- terminal-initialization utility
133
134The first two (tic and infocmp) are used for manipulating terminfo
135descriptions; the next two (clear and tput) are for use in shell scripts. The
136last (tset) is provided for 4.4BSD compatibility. The source code for all of
137these lives in the `progs' directory.
138
139Detailed documentation for all libraries and utilities can be found in the
140`man' and `doc' directories. An HTML introduction to ncurses, panels, and
141menus programming lives in the `doc/html' directory. Manpages in HTML format
142are under `doc/html/man'.
143
144The `test' directory contains programs that can be used to verify or
145demonstrate the functions of the ncurses libraries. See test/README for
146descriptions of these programs. Notably, the `ncurses' utility is designed to
147help you systematically exercise the library functions.
148
149AUTHORS:
150
151Pavel Curtis:
152 wrote the original ncurses
153
154Zeyd M. Ben-Halim:
155 port of original to Linux and many enhancements.
156
157Thomas Dickey (maintainer for 1.9.9g through 4.1, resuming with FSF's 5.0):
158 configuration scripts, porting, mods to adhere to XSI Curses in the
159 areas of background color, terminal modes. Also memory leak testing,
160 the wresize, default colors and key definition extensions and numerous
161 bug fixes -- more than half of those enumerated in NEWS beginning with
162 the internal release 1.8.9, see
163
164 http://invisible-island.net/personal/changelogs.html
165
166Florian La Roche (official maintainer for FSF's ncurses 4.2)
167 Beginning with release 4.2, ncurses is distributed under an MIT-style
168 license.
169
170Eric S. Raymond:
171 the man pages, infocmp(1), tput(1), clear(1), captoinfo(1), tset(1),
172 toe(1), most of tic(1), trace levels, the HTML intro, wgetnstr() and
173 many other entry points, the cursor-movement optimization, the
174 scroll-pack optimizer for vertical motions, the mouse interface and
175 xterm mouse support, and the ncurses test program.
176
177Juergen Pfeifer
178 The menu and form libraries, C++ bindings for ncurses, menus, forms and
179 panels, as well as the Ada95 binding. Ongoing support for panel.
180
181CONTRIBUTORS:
182
183Alexander V. Lukyanov
184 for numerous fixes and improvements to the optimization logic.
185
186David MacKenzie
187 for first-class bug-chasing and methodical testing.
188
189Ross Ridge
190 for the code that hacks termcap parameterized strings into terminfo.
191
192Warren Tucker and Gerhard Fuernkranz,
193 for writing and sending the panel library.
194
195Hellmuth Michaelis,
196 for many patches and testing the optimization code.
197
198Eric Newton, Ulrich Drepper, and Anatoly Ivasyuk:
199 the C++ code.
200
201Jonathan Ross,
202 for lessons in using sed.
203
204Keith Bostic (maintainer of 4.4BSD curses)
205 for help, criticism, comments, bug-finding, and being willing to
206 deep-six BSD curses for this one when it grew up.
207
208Richard Stallman,
209 for his commitment to making ncurses free software.
210
211Countless other people have contributed by reporting bugs, sending fixes,
212suggesting improvements, and generally whining about ncurses :-)
213
214BUGS:
215 See the INSTALL file for bug and developer-list addresses.
216 The Hacker's Guide in the doc directory includes some guidelines
217 on how to report bugs in ways that will get them fixed most quickly.
218
README.emx
1-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2-- Copyright (c) 1998-2005,2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc. --
3-- --
4-- Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a --
5-- copy of this software and associated documentation files (the --
6-- "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including --
7-- without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, --
8-- distribute, distribute with modifications, sublicense, and/or sell copies --
9-- of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished --
10-- to do so, subject to the following conditions: --
11-- --
12-- The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included --
13-- in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. --
14-- --
15-- THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS --
16-- OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF --
17-- MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN --
18-- NO EVENT SHALL THE ABOVE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, --
19-- DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR --
20-- OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE --
21-- USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. --
22-- --
23-- Except as contained in this notice, the name(s) of the above copyright --
24-- holders shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the --
25-- sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior written --
26-- authorization. --
27-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
28-- $Id: README.emx,v 1.8 2006/04/22 22:19:37 tom Exp $
29-- Author: Thomas Dickey
30-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
31
32You can build ncurses on OS/2 in the EMX environment. But you must build and
33acquire tools. Not all of the tools distributed with EMX work properly, and
34some additional ones are required.
35
36First, the configure script distributed with ncurses will not run as-is in EMX.
37You can generate a new one if you have autoconf built for EMX. You will need
38the EMX development tools, of course. Get these programs to start:
39
40 GNU m4 program (version 1.4)
41 GNU autoconf (version 2.13).
42 GNU patch (version 2.5)
43
44Apply the autoconf patches from
45
46 http://invisible-island.net/autoconf
47 ftp://invisible-island.net/autoconf
48
49These are ordered by date:
50
51 autoconf-2.13-20030927.patch.gz
52 autoconf-2.13-20030927-emx.patch.gz
53
54I built my development environment for ncurses using EMX 0.9c at the end of
551997. Much of the EMX patch for autoconf was done originally by J.J.G.Ripoll,
56using a similar environment (he prefers using the 'ash' shell). Newer versions
57may fix these problems:
58
59 + The pdksh program distributed at Hobbes and Leo (with a 1996 date) is
60 defective. It does not process "here documents" correctly (which
61 renders it useless for running the autoconf script). I built my own
62 copy of pdksh 5.2.13, which does have the bug corrected (documented
63 in the change log for pdksh).
64
65 + I also built from sources (because the distributed binaries did not
66 work) the cmp, diff programs.
67
68 Other required utilities such as ar, cat, chmod, cp, gawk, grep, mv,
69 ls, rm, mkdir, sed, sort and tr worked.
70
71Once you have autoconf patched and installed, run 'autoconf' from the top-level
72directory of ncurses to generate the EMX-specific configure script.
73
README.MinGW
1-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2-- Copyright (c) 2008-2011,2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc. --
3-- --
4-- Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a --
5-- copy of this software and associated documentation files (the --
6-- "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including --
7-- without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, --
8-- distribute, distribute with modifications, sublicense, and/or sell copies --
9-- of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished --
10-- to do so, subject to the following conditions: --
11-- --
12-- The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included --
13-- in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. --
14-- --
15-- THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS --
16-- OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF --
17-- MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN --
18-- NO EVENT SHALL THE ABOVE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, --
19-- DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR --
20-- OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE --
21-- USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. --
22-- --
23-- Except as contained in this notice, the name(s) of the above copyright --
24-- holders shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the --
25-- sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior written --
26-- authorization. --
27-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
28-- $Id: README.MinGW,v 1.9 2012/09/22 17:46:04 tom Exp $
29-- Author: Juergen Pfeifer
30-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
31
32This is work in progress, but it's in an state where one can see it
33works at least on the Windows Console.
34
35You should install the MSYS package, so that you've a shell environment that
36allows you to run the scripts, especially configure etc. You can get that
37from http://www.mingw.org
38
39To build ncurses for native Windows, you need the MinGW toolchain. The
40original MinGW toolchain from the above site is only for 32-Bit Windows. As
41Windows Server - and also regular workstations - are moving to 64-Bit, it
42seems to be reasonable to have a toolchain that supports both architectures.
43I recommend to use the TDM gcc toolchain which you can find at
44http://tdm-gcc.tdragon.net/download. Go to the download section and select
45the bundle installer for tdm64 (MinGW-w64). This installs a multilib version
46of the gcc toolchain that can compile for native 32- and 64-Bit Windows
47versions. It also comes with a working pthread implementation.
48
49The latest config and build scripts we use for MinGW have only been tested
50for the gcc-4.6.1 compiler toolchain (or better).
51
52Using MinGW is a pragmatic decision, it's the easiest way to port this
53heavily UNIX based sourcebase to native Windows. The goal is of course
54to provide the includes, libraries and DLLs to be used with the more
55common traditional development environments on Windows, mainly with
56Microsoft Visual Studio.
57
58The TERM environment variable must be set specially to active the Windows
59console-driver. The driver checks if TERM is set to "#win32con" (explicit
60use) or if TERM is unset or empty (implicit).
61
62Please also make sure that MSYS links to the correct directory containing
63your MinGW toolchain. For TDM this is usually C:\MinGW64. In your Windows
64CMD.EXE command shell go to the MSYS root directory (most probably
65C:\MSYS or C:\MSYS\1.0) and verify, that there is a junction point mingw
66that points to the MinGW toolchain directory. If not, delete the mingw
67directory and use the mklink command (or the linkd.exe utility on older
68Windows) to create the junction point.
69
70This code requires WindowsNT 5.1 or better, which means on the client
71Windows XP or better, on the server Windows Server 2003 or better.
72
73I recommend using libtool to build ncurses on MinGW, because libtool
74knows exactly how to build dll's on Windows for use with MinGW.
75
76To build a modern but still small footprint ncurses that provides
77hooks for interop, I recommend using these options:
78
79 --with-libtool
80 --disable-home-terminfo
81 --enable-database
82 --disable-termcap
83 --enable-sp-funcs
84 --enable-term-driver
85 --enable-interop
86
87This is the configuration commandline as I'm using it at the moment (assuming
88environment variable MINGW_ROOT to hold the root directory name of your MinGW
89build):
90
91./configure \
92 --prefix=$MINGW_ROOT \
93 --with-cxx \
94 --without-ada \
95 --enable-warnings \
96 --enable-assertions \
97 --disable-home-terminfo \
98 --enable-database \
99 --enable-sp-funcs \
100 --enable-term-driver \
101 --enable-interop \
102 --disable-termcap \
103 --with-progs \
104 --with-libtool \
105 --enable-pc-files \
106 --mandir=$MINGW_ROOT/share/man
107
108Please note that it is also necessary to set this environment variable:
109
110export PATH_SEPARATOR=";"
111
112in order to parse the terminfo paths correctly. Terminfo paths should
113always be separated by a seeeemicolon,even when running under MSYS.
114
115To support regular expressions properly, ncurses under MinGW should be
116linked against the gnurx regex library, which must be built separately
117under MinGW. See
118
119 ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/binaries/win32/dependencies/libgnurx-src-2.5.zip
120
121All the options above are - like the whole Windows support -
122experimental.
123
124A lot is still TODO, e.g.:
125
126 - Wide Character support (display is workable, but input untested)
127 The Win32Con driver should actually only use Unicode in the
128 future.
129 - Thread support (locking). If using TDM toolchain this is done by
130 configuring pthreads.
131 - A GUI console driver
132 - Support for Terminals attached via a serial port (via terminfo)
133 - Support for networked Terminal connections (via terminfo)
134 - Workarounds for MinGW's filesystem access are necessary to make infocmp
135 work (though tic works).
136
137To support terminfo, we would need to have an ioctl() simulation for the
138serial and networked terminals.
139