Having struggled with the venerable curses library and the ruby interface to it for many years, I finally got around to write an alternative - in pure Ruby.

Simple. One file. No external requirements.

Simply run gem install rcurses.

To use this library do:

require 'rcurses'

• Create panes (with the colors and(or border), manipulate the panes and add content
• Dress up text (in panes or anywhere in the terminal) in bold, italic, underline, reverse color, blink and in any 256 terminal colors for foreground and background
• Use a simple editor to let users edit text in panes
• Left, right or center align text in panes
• Cursor movement around the terminal

rcurses gives you the following elements:

• The class Pane to create and manilpulate panes/boxes
• Extensions to the class String to print text in various degrees of fancy and also strip any fanciness
• A module Cursor to give you cursor movements around the terminal
• A module Rinput providing the function getchr to capture a single character input from the user (much better than any Ruby built-ins)

To create a pane do something like this:

mypane = Rcurses::Pane.new(80, 30, 30, 10, 19, 229)

This will create a pane/box starting at terminal column/x 80 and row/y 30 with the width of 30 characters and a hight of 10 characters and with the foreground color 19 and background color 229 (from the 256 choices available)

The format for creating a pane is:

Rcurses::Pane.new(startx, starty, width, height, foregroundcolor, backgroundcolor)

You can drop the last two 256-color codes to create a pane with the defaults for your terminal. Also, you can add anything as startx, starty, width or height as those values will be run through a Ruby eval and stored in readable variables x, y, w and h respectively. So, a hight value of "@maxrow/2" is valid to create a pane with the height of half the terminal height (the integer corresponding to half the terminal height will then be accessible as the variable h). Use the variables @maxrow for terminal height and @maxcol for terminal width.

Avaliable properties/variables:

The methods for Pane:

Method extensions provided for the class String:

PS: Blink does not work in conjunction with setting a background color in urxvt. It does work in gnome-terminal. But the overall performance in urxvt as orders of magnitude better than gnome-terminal.

Create a new cursor object with mycursor = Cursor. Then you can apply the following methods to mycursor:

rcurses provides a vital extension to Ruby in reading characters entered by the user. This is especially needed for curses applications where readline inputs are required. The function getchr is automatically included in your arsenal when you first do include rcurses.

Simply use chr = getchr in a program to read any character input by the user. The returning code (the content of chr in this example) could be any of the following:

Any other character enter will be returned (to chr in the example above).

In order to handle several character pased into STDIN by the user (and not only returned the first character only, your program should empty the STDIN like this:

while $stdin.ready?
  chr += $stdin.getc
end

Try this in irb:

require 'rcurses'
mypane = Pane.new("@maxcol/2", 30, 30, 10, 19, 229)
mypane.border = true
mypane.text = "Hello".i + " World!".b.i + "\n \n" + "rcurses".r + " " + "is cool".c("16,212")
mypane.refresh
mypane.edit

... and then try to add some bold text by enclosing it in '*' and italics by enclosing text in '/'. Then press 'ctrl-s' to save your edited text - and then type mypane.refresh to see the result.

Let me know what other features you like to see.

Just steal or borrow anything you like. This is now Public Domain.