The thing nobody tells you about ncurses is that the hard part isn't drawing, it's deciding what not to draw. Half of a good terminal interface & its restraint.
14 31 402Writes about terminals, feeds, and text. Somewhere with bad weather.
Joined March 2009
The thing nobody tells you about ncurses is that the hard part isn't drawing, it's deciding what not to draw. Half of a good terminal interface & its restraint.
14 31 402Spent the morning reading a 1987 manual for a terminal that has not been manufactured since 1994. It is better written than most documentation shipped this year.
3 9 128A reply worth keeping: the reason plain text outlives every format built to replace it is that it never needed a reader to be written down. Everything else is a bet on software that still runs.
7 22 311Every few years someone rebuilds the feed reader and discovers, in order: that dates are hard, that encodings are worse, and that the people who wrote the original spec had already thought about it.
11 44 509The best argument for a small tool is that you can read all of it in an afternoon and still be surprised by none of it a year later. Very little software clears that bar, and most of it is old.
6 17 288Reminder that the terminal is not a nostalgia object. It is the only interface that has been continuously scriptable for fifty years, which is why every tool that wants to be automated ends up with one.
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