Subject: Alternative libcurses for cygwin b19
From: [email-masked]

5 Mar 1998 11:43:54 -0800
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
To: [email-masked]

A lot of older programs, like less, look for libraries like ncurses and
curses as their terminal libraries.  One of the advantages of using a
library like libslang is that it can be compiled so that it uses its
own built-in termcap in place of libtermcap and it doesn't spread itself
around needlessly like the terminal libraries that use terminfo in place
of the /etc/termcap file.

Slang has a little-known curses-emulation feature that lets you finagle
configure scripts to link to libslang instead of libcurses, also getting
you the advantage of using the termcap file.  All you have to do is compile
libslang as a Unix library (using its own configure script under b19) and
store the resulting libslang.a as /usr/local/lib/libcurses.a.  You then
copy slcurses.h form the slang directory to /usr/local/include/curses.h.

Getting the configure script to accept libslang as libcurses involves
finding where in the configure script the test libcurses program is and
substituting the <slcurses.h> version of the calls at that point in
configure.  Since cygwinb19 has a terminal window with many fixes over
the b18 version, less.exe works quite well, with no garbage characters
on the screen, only in monochrome, no color.

It should be noted that the Mingw32 version of less.exe no longer works
with cygwin, since the b19 version of cygwin bash claims that there is a
`broken pipe' when, e. g., `ls | less' is called.

-
For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to
"[email-masked]" with one line of text: "help".