A high-level ncurses alternative written in Haskell
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Jonathan Daugherty 74a7c557fb Add support for custom character width table installation
This change introduces a new module,
Graphics.Vty.UnicodeWidthTable.Install, that is responsible for
installing custom unicode width tables into the process. It does so by
allocating memory to hold the table, populating the table's character
ranges with widths from the UnicodeWidthTable, and then marking the
table as ready for use. That causes future calls to 'wcwidth' to consult
the new table rather than relying on the built-in logic to compute
widths.

Note that this functionality breaks the purity of 'wcwidth': 'wcwidth'
calls made before the installation of a custom table may return
different values after the table is installed, despite 'wcwidth' being a
pure function. This choice was made deliberately to simplify the API and
is based on the observation that in practice this will probably never be
an issue.

It's also worth nothing (as is spelled out in the docs, too) that a
custom table installation can only be performed at most once per program
lifetime. Once a custom table installation is performed, it cannot be
undone and no new table can be installed. This, too, is a simplification
based on the assumption that in practice multiple tables will usually
not be required.
2020-03-02 14:05:40 -08:00
cbits Add support for custom character width table installation 2020-03-02 14:05:40 -08:00
ci Fix ghc version comparison in travis scripts 2016-04-13 13:05:49 +06:00
demos Add Graphics.Vty.Config.getTtyEraseChar 2020-02-27 09:46:04 -08:00
docs Move DESIGN to docs/ 2017-01-21 20:06:15 -08:00
scripts refactor vty to use standard naming convention. 2014-04-11 17:51:13 -07:00
src Add support for custom character width table installation 2020-03-02 14:05:40 -08:00
test Removed commented out import System.Posix.Env 2019-02-23 10:20:10 +01:00
tools BuildUnicodeTable: use foldr 2020-03-02 13:37:32 -08:00
.gitignore Cap minimum values of charFill arguments to zero 2017-06-28 20:19:04 -05:00
.travis.yml update travis build settings 2018-07-29 10:01:47 -07:00
AUTHORS Rename CHANGELOG, improve formatting 2017-01-21 20:13:46 -08:00
CHANGELOG.md Bump version, update changelog 2020-02-27 10:57:05 -08:00
LICENSE use alloca instead of mallocBytes for exception safety 2009-09-04 10:29:28 -07:00
README.md Add notes about requirement of threaded RTS (fixes #142) 2018-02-06 08:40:00 -08:00
Setup.lhs use alloca instead of mallocBytes for exception safety 2009-09-04 10:29:28 -07:00
vty.cabal Add support for custom character width table installation 2020-03-02 14:05:40 -08:00

Build Status

vty is a terminal interface library. It provides a high-level interface for doing terminal I/O. Vty is supported on GHC versions 7.10.1 and up.

Install via git with:

git clone git://github.com/jtdaugherty/vty.git

Install via cabal with:

cabal install vty

Features

  • Supports a large number of terminals. vt100, ansi, hurd, linux, screen, etc., or anything with a sufficient terminfo entry.

  • Automatic handling of window resizes.

  • Unicode output on terminals with UTF-8 support.

  • Handles multi-column glyphs. (Requires user to properly configure terminal.)

  • Efficient output. Output buffering and terminal state changes are minimized.

  • Minimizes repaint area, which virtually eliminates the flicker problems that plague ncurses programs.

  • A pure, compositional interface for efficiently constructing display images.

  • Automatically decodes keyboard keys into (key,[modifier]) tuples.

  • Automatically supports refresh on Ctrl-L.

  • Supports a keypress timeout after for lone ESC. The timeout is customizable.

  • The interface is designed for easy extension.

  • Supports ANSI graphics modes (SGR as defined in console_codes(4)) with a type-safe interface and graceful fallback for terminals with limited or nonexistent support for such modes.

  • Properly handles cleanup (but not due to signals).

  • Provides a comprehensive test suite.

  • Supports "normal" and "extended" (SGR) mouse modes as described at http://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.html#h2-Mouse-Tracking

  • Supports bracketed paste mode as described at http://cirw.in/blog/bracketed-paste

Development Notes

Vty uses threads internally, so programs made with Vty need to be compiled with the threaded runtime using the GHC -threaded option.

Platform Support

Posix Terminals

Uses terminfo to determine terminal protocol. With some special rules to handle some omissions from terminfo.

Windows

Unsupported (but contributions and testing here are very welcome!)

Contributing

If you decide to contribute, that's great! Here are some guidelines you should consider to make submitting patches easier for all concerned:

  • If you want to take on big things, talk to me first; let's have a design/vision discussion before you start coding. Create a GitHub issue and we can use that as the place to hash things out.
  • If you make changes, make them consistent with the syntactic conventions already used in the codebase.
  • Please provide Haddock documentation for any changes you make.

Development Notes

Under NixOS

Using cabal

After installing ncurses to the user environment:

LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/.nix-profile/lib/ cabal configure --enable-tests --extra-lib-dirs=$HOME/.nix-profile/lib
LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/.nix-profile/lib/ cabal build
LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/.nix-profile/lib/ cabal test

Code Coverage

As of last testing, profiling causes issues with coverage when enabled. To evaluate coverage, configure as follows:

rm -rf dist ; cabal configure --enable-tests --enable-library-coverage \
  --disable-library-profiling \
  --disable-executable-profiling

Profiling

rm -rf dist ; cabal configure --enable-tests --disable-library-coverage \
  --enable-library-profiling \
  --enable-executable-profiling

Known Issues

  • Terminals have numerous quirks and bugs. Vty picks what works best for the author in ambiguous or buggy situations.

  • Signal handling of STOP, TERM and INT are nonexistent.

  • The character encoding of the terminal is assumed to be UTF-8 if unicode is used.

  • Terminfo is assumed to be correct unless there is an override configured. Some terminals will not have correct special key support (shifted F10 etc). See Config for customizing vty's behavior for a particular terminal.

  • Uses the TIOCGWINSZ ioctl to find the current window size, which appears to be limited to Linux and BSD.

Sources

Good sources of documentation for terminal programming are: