My new project

clasqm

Remember when programs looked like this?

Ah yes, carefully drawn boxes drawn with high-ASCII graphics. Perfect, until your user switched to a different code page. 😦

You might think that those box characters disappeared when we abandoned ASCII for Unicode, replaced by Latin-Extended. But in fact they still exist, just hidden in faraway regions of the Unicode map. And so it should be possible to recreate the glory days of DOS text-mode programming. Possible, but not easy. You can't just assume an 80x25 screen like we did back then.

My new project is to create a series of simple utilities that can be called from any language that can issue a system call to draw boxes, alerts, and menus. I'll probably end up reinventing the wheel and duplicating functionality already in dialog. So be it. That program is unnecessarily weird.

Proof of concept: The first utility is up. In source code only for now: https://codeberg.org/clasqm/boxutils

What does boxmaker do? Glad you asked. It makes boxes. That's it. I told you I was going for simplicity.

Demo shell script:

!# /bin/sh

clear
boxmaker --yellow --onelinetop --solid 
echo "command: boxmaker --yellow --onelinetop --solid"
boxmaker --cyan --middlethird --double --lightfill
echo "command: boxmaker --cyan --middlethird --double --lightfill"
boxmaker --onelinebottom --red --single
echo "boxmaker --onelinebottom --red --single"
read -n 1

Result:

Of course, it can do more: Here's a look at the help:

This will be a Haiku-first project, but it should compile on any platform that has BaCON.

Atomozero

clasqm My new project is to create a series of simple utilities that can be called from any language that can issue a system call to draw boxes, alerts, and menus.

Out of curiosity, what do you primarily imagine it being used for?

clasqm

I still like text-mode programs. I came from the DOS era, and there's a whole level of sophisticated, useful prgrams that the *NIX world just skipped over. Either you string together CLI applets, feeding the results from one into the next, or you resign yourself to the memory and storage overhead of a graphical framework. I'm not impressed by the few *NIX CLI programs. Some of them proudly use WordStar keybindings. Wordstar? Really? Even DOS users abandoned that the moment something else became available. Others use, lord help us, vi keystrokes, which I believe was originally a medieval torture method. If you require the user to memorise things, you have failed.

I'll still write in yab, but I'm increasingly thinking "why do that, when I can have something that just flashes onto the screen?" I need tools that will let me write one "engine", the piece that does the actual work, and then dress it up for both graphical and CLI use.

So I am writing the tools that I will end up using for my own programs. If anyone else would like to use them, they are welcome.

Shaka444

You would probably appreciate javidx9 stuff. He makes things like Terminal based 3D graphics engines :-)