How would one go about developing a curses-based UI?

Question

I'm planning to develop a GUI application that uses curses. The idea is to provide an extra interface for a web interface, so that everything on the web site could also be done via the UI.

Basically, it should be platform independent: the user would have to SSH to the server after which the UI would automatically take over.

First of all, is this doable? As far as I understand, it would be platform independent as long as the end-user had the proper terminal software installed. Correct me, if I'm wrong.

I was planning to use Python for this, as it is the language I'm the most proficient in. Python comes with the ncurses library and Urwid, which I've been told, is quite good.

After having a quick test with Urwid, I had some problems. The thing is, I'm quite worried that I won't find answers to the problems that I will encounter down the road because apparently curses UI-s aren't all the rage nowadays. Documentation and examples are thus quite scarce.

In conclusion, should really I embark on this and quit my whining or drop the idea altogether? Any other suggestions?

Answer 1

It's certainly possible, and curses-based applications are still written regularly (e.g. PuDB is only 14 months old) although maybe not very often.

Did you try asking questions on the Urwid mailing list and/or IRC channel?

Answer 2

oh my, wouldn't this be a dream!

i've seen a couple of things out there to varying degrees of success.

Morticious Thrind: http://thrind.xamai.ca/

future death toll: http://f-dt.com/?wptheme=wp-cli

wordpress yadda yadda, this could be as simple as a 960/blueprint CSS, prototype.js, and a oneliner:

//TODO: Implement useful functionality && unit tests && documentation
//TODO: read 

try { eval($F(x)); } catch (e) { panic(); }

BUT! this type of thing is pretty radical. i mean- ANYTHING can happen on the canvas of a web-browser these days, but any terminal emulator or lynx serves this purpose with flare.

also be sure to check out: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/472644/javascript-collection-of-one-line-useful-functions

the real question is what sort of software you plan on ncursing (sic,pun,etc.)-- it probably already has some rather useful command-line interfaces (sh).

Answer 3

It can be done but it's a struggle. I would recommend improving the web interface. You can use JavaScript to add keyboard shortcuts, for example, which can be very helpful for a faster workflow (see Gmail's interface, for example).