[Haskell-cafe] HSCurses - Hello World? (can't find much documentation)

[Ari Rahikkala]

On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 11:18 PM, Anonymous Void <byteasphyxia at gmail.com> wrote:
> But since I've never seen how the HSCurses functions really integrate
> together, or any tutorials/examples (besides hsFishEx),
> I fear toying with it is going to be annoying until I figure it out on my
> own, especially since I'm already doing a project for someone...
> So, I was wondering if anyone would be kind enough to point me to (or write
> me) a basic example of how HSCurses works,
> maybe w/ some very simple example of interactivity (e.g. getch processing,
> screen refresh, ..)  support.
> Also, maybe warn me of some of the common pitfalls and differences in
> hscurses vs ncurses in other languages.

UI.HSCurses.Curses follows ncurses quite closely so you can get pretty
far reading the NCurses Programming HOWTO:
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/NCURSES-Programming-HOWTO/ .Don't forget to have
the ncurses man pages handy - usually you'll just need to lowercase
the name of a HSCurses function to get the name of the same function
in ncurses. If you're going to be using colours or styles (bold,
underline, etc), do take a look at CursesHelper too - its API
documentation is somewhat better than Curses's.

You could also try looking at the ContactManager program in hscurses's
example directory. Just to get you started, though, here's a trivial
HSCurses program to exhibit simple interaction (a walking '@'):

module Main where

import UI.HSCurses.Curses

-- | Useful for transforming a Char to a ChType. Not sure if this is
safe outside of the 7-bit ASCII range.
castEnum = toEnum . fromEnum

-- note that curses positions are (y, x) coordinates, with (0, 0)
being the upmost leftmost position
moveAbout pY pX = do
 erase -- clear curses's virtual screen but don't force a redraw
 mvAddCh pY pX (castEnum '@') -- place a character in curses's virtual screen
 refresh -- copy the virtual screen to the terminal
 c <- getCh
 case c of
   KeyUp -> moveAbout (pY - 1) pX
   KeyDown -> moveAbout (pY + 1) pX
   KeyLeft -> moveAbout pY (pX - 1)
   KeyRight -> moveAbout pY (pX + 1)
   _ -> return ()

main = do
 initCurses
 keypad stdScr True -- make the cursor keys usable
 echo False -- disable terminal echo
 cursSet CursorInvisible
 (sizeY, sizeX) <- scrSize
 moveAbout (sizeY `div` 2) (sizeX `div` 2)
 endWin