Color your terminal's output

Johannes Pfau spam at example.com
Sat Oct 8 02:22:19 PDT 2011


Jens Mueller wrote:
>Trass3r wrote:
>> >You could use ANSI codes on posix to avoid a dependency on curses:
>> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code#Colors
>> >But I think using curses is ok. ncurses is MIT licensed and can be
>> >used as a dynamic library, so I don't think there are license
>> >problems.
>> >
>> >However, I'd recommend to load ncurses dynamically with dlopen/dlsym
>> >and fallback to simple text output if the ncurses library cannot be
>> >loaded.
>> 
>> +1
>> There shouldn't be a hard dependency on curses.
>
>I had the impression that even though there is this standard how do I
>know that I have a standard-compliant terminal. Can I just assume this?
>I started using curses because I had the impression there may be
>non-standard terminals. But this seems to be minor issue. I will change
>this if people are happy with Windows and ISO/IEC 6429 compliant
>terminals only.
>Thanks.
>
>Jens

AFAIK the capabilities of a terminal are found using the terminfo
database:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_capabilities
But it seems there's no standard stand-alone library to access this
database. Curses seems the only simple way to access this database, so
I'd say:
Try to load curses at runtime, if that fails, fall back to simple
non-colored text output.

-- 
Johannes Pfau



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