Archived

ncurses library is too hard. I still have a happy life to leave and looking at ncurses source code does not contribute to it. Feel free to fork it or use it as an education material.

Ncurses Zig wrapper

Zig bindings for the ncurses library v6.2, a library for writing terminal user interfaces (TUI) and terminal based games.

In heavy development. Usable but incomplete.

Quickstart

Requires to install system libraries ncurses, ncurses-dev.

Clone this repository and move to it

git clone <this repo>
cd <this repo>

Copy this program to hello.zig:

usingnamespace @import("lib.zig").ncurses;

pub fn main() !void {
    _ = try initscr();
    defer endwin() catch {};
    try printwzig("All your {s}\n", .{"codebase"});
    try addstrzig("are belong to us.");
    try refresh();
    _ = try getch();
}

Run it with zig run -lc -lcurses hello.zig.

See examples/ directory for more advanced things.

Compared to C

All the names are saved as they are
Functions whose first argument is Window or Screen are inside respective structs and can be called as stdscr.wprintw(...).
In some places like getyx we must pass pointers, not values in place of y and x.
Functions don't return -1 on error, they return Zig error from union.
Printing functions have same interface as Zig and always take a struct .{} as a second argument. For strings pass a pointer string.ptr instead of the string itself.

Printing

Don't use ncurses functions for printing strings to the screen unless you have to. Use Zig versions instead with zig suffix at the end such as:

printwzig
mvprintwzig
addstrzig
mvaddstrzig
wprintwzig
mvwprintwzig
waddstrzig
mvwaddstrzig

They use []const u8 types for strings and formatting functions support Zig print format, for example {d} for numbers instead of %d C style printf. They also presumably do less allocations.

Window also implements Writer Zig interface and you can access it with writer function, for example stdscr.writer().

Thoughts about this wrapper

In C error checking is tedious and sometimes completely ignored. In this library almost every function can return an error. Zig makes it so trivial with try.
There was an idea of also transforming all names to native Zig casing but the library looks too inconsistent and old, for example there are functions like attron and attr_on. If we convert attr_on to attrOn, someone's head can eventually explode having to keep in mind all 3 versions and converting between them.
Since there are complications with functions, we can as well go all the way in, so even constants are in C style SHOUTING_CASE.
The single deviation is the use of Zig struct, for example for WINDOW there's a Window struct which keeps all the functions with the first argument self, a thin wrapper around the C pointer.
Implementing Zig interfaces is so cool, for example Writer interface on Window allows us to use parts of standard library with this struct.

License

MIT.