Curses and portability question.

[Peter Holzer]

drack at titan.tsd.arlut.utexas.edu (Dave Rackley) writes:

>In article <1990Dec10.110403.139 at vax1.mankato.msus.edu> accwork at vax1.mankato.msus.edu writes:


>>I am writing a program, which i hope to maintain a high level of portability. 
>>But i also want to some screen management.  I was planning on using curses.  Is
>>this a "good" choice ?  Is their something that is more standard ?  I hope to
>>keep the portability accross a vax, and a pc.  So is their any chance of this >?


>When faced with this situation I chose to use ANSI escape sequences
>instead of curses.  VAXen with VMS and DOS machines have very similar
>escape codes. 

The escape codes have nothing to do with your computer or
operating system but only with the _terminal_ you use (Or the
screen driver in case of a memory mapped display). 

Curses does exist for MS-DOS (there is at least one PD-version
called PCurses) and I think there should be one for VMS too.

If you are not ABSOLUTELY sure that all users of your program
will use the same terminals as you are using now, you should use
curses.


>Just my two cents worth :-)

--
|    _  | Peter J. Holzer                       | Think of it   |
| |_|_) | Technical University Vienna           | as evolution  |
| | |   | Dept. for Real-Time Systems           | in action!    |
| __/   | hp at vmars.tuwien.ac.at                 |     Tony Rand |