nCurses

[RobinVossen]

Hello,
I am looking for programs using Ncurses.
I want to run as many programs with the Ncurses library, so who knows some?

[Freston]

pkgtools

But why?? Not to be blunt, but...

Ah! Of course! You're putting some life back into a really old piece of machinery, right? And with ncurses you can do without a window manager, to safe resources and still have something of a visual environment

The beauty is of course that you can build a ncurses front-end for a lot of text based programs. CDParanoia, CDRecord, ehm ... anything really... Dunno much about ready made programs though. Sorry.

[RobinVossen]

pkgtools

But why?? Not to be blunt, but...

Ah! Of course! You're putting some life back into a really old piece of machinery, right?

Almost, I am going to put life in a new piece of equipment. ^^
But, well its a Computer the Size of a PocketPC. I love CommandLine and since it only has 128MB Ram I want to be able to run ncurses software.
It looks cool ^^ And well I know I can write wrappers. But its cooler to just first make my own Distro with LFS. And then put lots of ncureses progs on it ot save DiskSpace. (since there still isnt a 4Gig or Bigger MicroSD. And I dont want to wait for 1 year to get a 4Gig So I can AND store my data on my DIYPDA and Run Linux And have Swap Space
So, I want Ncurses

Midnight Commander, calcurses.

[Freston]

That sounds interesting

Are you planning on getting it to sync with a PC, or a mother system of some kind? It would be cool if it had some level of integration with the rest of your systems (think print functionality here, and sharing of (plain text) email&documents).

MC is of course not really an application to run. It doesn't add end-user functionality, it just supports operation. What will the end system be able to do?

Word processing, spreadsheet, e-mail, internet, multi-media? Project management, agenda, ehm... store addresses??

How about gnuplot, some kind of expr front-end (already exists, forgot the name but I believe it's in the Slackware default install), and there is bound to be a pretty darn dandy word processor that at least equals the functionality of WP5.1... and do not forget to include aaxine (I'll build you a nCurses front-end myself if needs be)

I dont want to wait for 1 year to get a 4Gig So I can AND store my data on my DIYPDA and Run Linux And have Swap Space
So, I want Ncurses

And right you are!

[Dapper Dan]

We were talking about this before... I really believe there would be a good acceptance for a Linux distro that runs entirely without X windows. As far as making your own distro RobinVossen, have you looked at Crux? They have a pretty straight ahead "how to" on making your own personalized distro based on their "base" 2.3 install cd...

Link

Forgot to mention: xmms-curses

[RobinVossen]

No I havnt yet.
But well my system if going well now.
The designs are nearly done.

[General]
PDA with:
* Linux (Debian/Gentoo)
* 600Mhz CPU
* 128MB RAM
* 32MB Flash
* RJ-45
* Wifi
* MicroSD Slot
* GSM
* GPS
* Rechargeable-Battery 
* Camara

[General Tools ]
XFCE
WebBrowser (Firefox?)
Gedit - vi
Personal Information Manager - calcurses
Amarok - VLC 
Conky
Pidgin
KeePassX
TrueCrypt
Cowsay
Skype
Codeblocks
putty
OpenSSH
Mutt
MidnightCommander
Some Games
gpsdrive
GPRSEasyConnect (?)
hPing
Wireshark
nMap
Aircrack-ng
Kismet
Netcat/Cryptcat/Socat
Ettercap
Paketto
AirSnort
John the Ripper
Hydra

That is the Software Plan now.
But due the lack of space I want to be sure. So I want Ncurses stuff since that really looks cool

The Hardware mapping is also nearly done.

I am already writing Syncing Software. And well.. ^^
Thanks Dapper I am going to look into Crux. And well Since I know exacly what software I want I might go for Lunar Linux or LFS.

Freston, I hope this answers also your Question.

But anyone else has good ncurses software?

Edit: I looked into Crux. Cant run that there isn't Arm version of it

[bidi]

FYI, for the web browser you can probably use Links built with X11 instead of something as bloated as Firefox. That being said, X11 Links takes a little getting used to as it doesn't render pages as well as the more fully featured browsers.

As for the ncurses apps, the ncurses home includes a shorts list: Announcing ncurses 5.6 - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF)
Also, check Slackware's repository, it uses a lot of ncurses/text based software, so you might find something you like (*****X, the IRC client, comes to mind).
And, I just went to linuxlinks.com and typed ncurses as a search word:
Linux Links - The Linux Portal: Search Results

Good luck. I've been building a text only machine myself (I know this is not your case) and installed Slackware. It works OK, but Debian is better if you're planning on adding lots of software (Slackware always install the header files, which can occupy a lot of hard drive space, Debian puts them on -dev packages).

[jozyba]

If you open up Synaptic > Search > Look in: Dependencies' and search for ncurses you'll find loads of apps that use the ncurses libraries.

Here are some ideas:

lynx and w3m - text based web browsers. lynx is useful in scripts using 'lynx -dump' to extract text from html (links2 -dump is even better but it's not ncurses based). use them in combination with the 'wikipedia2text' script to to download wikipedia articles. e.g. wikipedia2text -o -b lynx "Terry Pratchett"

abook - a text-based ncurses address book application. designed for use with mutt, but can be used independently.

ispell - usually used with emacs or vim but I find it really useful directly from the command line: 'ispell <file>'.

qemacs and mg - both are ultralight versions of emacs. I prefer 'qemacs -nw' because it's both fast to start up and has enough emacs features so that I usually don't notice that I'm using a cut-down version.

cmatrix and tss - ncurses screensavers. silly stuff but nice.

dialog - not so much a programme as a programming tool. very useful for interactive scripts. if you've got 'dialog' installed then '/usr/share/doc/dialog/examples/' has lots of examples of how to use it.

wyrd - an ncurses front-end to the amazing 'remind' app. unfortunately my old eyes find it hard to read light text on a black background so I tend to use 'remind' straight from the command line. ('remind' has a supurb man page that will keep any geek diverted for weeks). The combination of wyrd and remind are more useful than calcurse in my opinion.

b i t c h x - IRC software. I don't use it myself but other people rate it highly.

oleo and sc - ncurses spreadsheets. I prefer sc because it seems better documented and featured.

ncdu - just a prettier version of du but nice.

htop - just a prettier version of top but nice.

hnb - a hierarchical notebook. I only came across this recently. Interesting, but I'm not sure it's for me as I already have a way of doing this in emacs, and when you've gone to the trouble of memorising emacs key-combos you don't throw them aside lightly.

cdargs - bookmarks and browser for cd shell built-in. Like so many of these clever ideas I've done without it so long that maybe I'll never get used to needing it.

tpp - an ncurses-based presentation programme. you feed it a marked-up file with text like this and it displays it in slides:
--author Edna St. Vincent Millay
--author US poet (1892 - 1950)
--title "A Few Figs from Thistles"
--date 1920
--newpage
My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -
It gives a lovely light.
--endoutput

less, more, most - obviously various pagers. pick your favourite.

mutt - sophisticated mail reader.

nethack, angband etc. - ncurses games where the quality of game-play outclasses the graphics instead of the other way around as is so often the case nowadays. After all these years I've still never survived nethack, but I will one day.

[RobinVossen]

Thanks alot, and Bidi. I know lynx worked with it for quite a while.
I want to try to run xfce one day, so I also want a Gui WebBrowser then. (Since else Ill be wasting, GPS, my touchscreen and the Camara)
Thanks for your help guys.

[Dapper Dan]

About a month ago, I had Links graphics working outside of X using just framebuffer. I was quite amazed at how good the pictures looked. You really had to look closely to notice any major differeneces. I would have taken a screenshot but... well... I wasn't in X windows... lol.