Hi Richard,

in brief, you can do anything with curses. You can write text on the
whole screen, use colors, the mouse. So it's not about technical
missing features.

However, the library makes it hard to do some things. First of all,
the library is seriously lacking in documentation. Just take a look to
the curses stdlib rdoc[1] to have an idea. I couldn't go really
further without looking at the provided examples.

Curses integrates a concept of windows. You set a window with top,
left, width and height. Then everything you write inside won't get out
of that box and it can be scrolled. The idea is pretty neat, but it
suffers some limitations. Because you don't have callbacks, you have
to make a loop to track the different changes (like mouse moves and
term resizes). And because it's not well documented, I found it was
hard to have consistent behavior.

It takes much too long to write a simple GUI.

[1] http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/curses/rdoc/classes/Curses.html

On 03/12/05, Richard Lyman <lymans / gmail.com> wrote:
> Is there something specifically that you've been trying to do but couldn't?
>
> Is it just the quality or speed of development that is annoying you?
>
> I ask only because I'm thinking about writing an Ncurses app, so feel
> free to 'dump'.
>
> -Rich

--
Cheers,
  zimba

http://zimba.oree.ch