2023

As someone who loves the terminal, I have often suspected that I could re-create the parts of NCurses functionality that I use in a few hundred lines of code. I’m not interested in developing for vintage computers. (I love them, but that’s a hobby that will have to wait until I move to a bigger apartment.) I haven’t found myself using the “window” functionality in NCurses. I always wrap NCurses “color pairs” in a function that allows me to arbitrarily paint any combination of colors in any cell. All I really want is to be able to “paint” my terminal, redraw a full screen of colored text (preferably at 60fps) and accept non-blocking keyboard input. It turns out that it really doesn’t take much code to do all this from scratch. […]