From: afn06760 AT afn DOT org Subject: Alternative libcurses for cygwin b19 5 Mar 1998 11:43:54 -0800 Message-ID: <199803051848.SAA146558.cygnus.gnu-win32@out4.ibm.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit To: gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com A lot of older programs, like less, look for libraries like ncurses and curses as their terminal libraries. One of the advantages of using a library like libslang is that it can be compiled so that it uses its own built-in termcap in place of libtermcap and it doesn't spread itself around needlessly like the terminal libraries that use terminfo in place of the /etc/termcap file. Slang has a little-known curses-emulation feature that lets you finagle configure scripts to link to libslang instead of libcurses, also getting you the advantage of using the termcap file. All you have to do is compile libslang as a Unix library (using its own configure script under b19) and store the resulting libslang.a as /usr/local/lib/libcurses.a. You then copy slcurses.h form the slang directory to /usr/local/include/curses.h. Getting the configure script to accept libslang as libcurses involves finding where in the configure script the test libcurses program is and substituting the version of the calls at that point in configure. Since cygwinb19 has a terminal window with many fixes over the b18 version, less.exe works quite well, with no garbage characters on the screen, only in monochrome, no color. It should be noted that the Mingw32 version of less.exe no longer works with cygwin, since the b19 version of cygwin bash claims that there is a `broken pipe' when, e. g., `ls | less' is called. - For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".