/ansiterm

go pkg to drive text-only console that understands ANSI Esc Codes (weekly 2012-3-4)

Primary LanguageGo

ansiterm ========

License details are at the end of this document. This document is (c) 2012 David Rook.

Comments can be sent to hotei1352@gmail.com .


Under The Hood

Source for escape sequences is the ANSI Escape Code Wikipedia article.

It's primarily intended to make "status reports" easier to handle on long running applications that don't warrant a full GUI display. These applications happen to be running on servers with a text only console. For some examples see the demo directory.

For the sake of simplicity I only implemented the functions needed for status reports.

  • Save cursor position
  • Restore cursor position
  • Erase N characters without moving cursor position
  • Erase whole line
  • Erase whole page
  • Move cursor to specific row,col
  • Reset terminal

You can see the wiki article mentions many more codes. I have no plans at present to expand coverage but it's very easy to do.

As noted in the source I'm not concerned about this program's efficiency (or rather lack of). My main() programs spend 99.9% of the time crunching numbers and that last point one percent is I/O. If your situation is different then time spent replacing fmt.Printf() could be worthwhile.

Also note the following caveats for MS Windows - again from the wiki "Win32 does not support ANSI sequences at all."

  • Won't work for older MSWin consoles without ANSI.SYS ie. DOS 1.0
  • Won't work for newer MSWin consoles - Win32 and later
  • Will work on your VT-100 if the hardware still functions :-)
  • Works on (some/most?) xterms, including default GNOME and KDE ? consoles
  • Works on FreeBSD (and others) using text consoles that respond to ANSI codes.

License

The 'ansiterm' go package and demo programs are distributed under the Simplified BSD License:

Copyright (c) 2012 David Rook. All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

  1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

  2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

// EOF README.md (this is a markdown document and tested OK with blackfriday)