[Haskell-cafe] Re: Projects that depend on the vty package?

[Simon Michael]

Hi Corey.. I noticed this thread via Haskell Weekly News.

Corey O'Connor wrote:
> For further development of the vty package I'm really only paying
> attention to the requirements that fall out of the Yi project. Are
> there any other projects that depend on the vty package?

Why yes! I just used it within the hledger project.

I found it easier to get started with the (h/nano)curses libs. From your 
cursor-moving example I started tweaking and soon had a working ui. It 
works well here and I'm hoping it will be pretty robust across platforms.

More top of the head feedback:

I liked the level of abstraction, it seems to handle a lot of routine 
stuff for me. I liked to hear that it avoids flicker that (apparently) 
curses suffers from.

I expected renderBS to convert a multiline string into an Image of 
height > 1.

It might be nice if the <-> and <|> combinators were more forgiving 
about mismatching dimensions, I get unexpected failures from them. After 
a failure like this my program quits but the terminal is not properly 
reset until I run "reset" manually.

I believe vty supports only whole-screen updates, and you could write 
more performant uis by careful use of *curses ? My experiment is quick 
enough for regular use on my macbook, but I can only move the cursor so 
fast and when I highlight the whole line that it's on there is 
noticeable double-display while I move. I haven't tried profiling yet. 
I'd welcome any tips on how to write a cross-platform TUI that updates 
instantly!

So thank you and Stefan O'Rear very much indeed!

-Simon