November 8, 2011
bifurcating into core and others

Perhaps it would be better to divide rbcurse into rbcurse-core and then other packages or gems. This way core can remain more or less frozen and bug fixes can be released quickly without waiting for other features to stabilize. Changes in other packages can be made without disturbing core. Core can be kept backward compatible. And it can remain light with just form, window, field, buttons, list and perhaps textview. Other widgets can be put in other gems. The entire extras, UI patterns, experimental work.

There could be a rbcurse-experimental which moves to either core or standard as and when it stabilizes.

1. rbcurse-core - form, field, label, buttons, dialogs, basiclist, messagebox viewer, menus? , combo - basically whatever is required to run test2 and test1.rb. We must have a minimal number of programs to test for this. Actually, test2 incorporates a lot!

2. rbcurse-util menus?, textarea?, tabbedpane, tree tables, tabular, keylabel, progress, scrollbar, statusline,

3. rbcurse-extras vimsplit, multi-containers, masterdetail, directorylist etc statuswindow, rcommandwindow link, menulink, container

4. rbcurse-experimental resultset, Pad, subwin,derwin from window class, scrollform, app, stack/flow gmailfield

5. rbcurse-demos rfe, sqlc/m, dbdemo which can be installed and run from anywhere appemail This must be dependent on a specific version of core and util.

6. rbcurse-db database related work - resultsetview etc

9:01am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZSxlQyBfmW6K
November 3, 2011
color formatting

Alot has happened since moving to ffi. New widgets and containers, a new tabbedpane that hopefully doesn’t suck and is more rubyesque. However, its amazing how simple the color formatting issue was. Took me only a few minutes to get working with a good regular expression.

The motivation is to be able to have a document with color formatting. I am using the color formatting code of tmux, i.e., #[fg=green, bg=blue, bold] etc. However, I added an “#[end]” tag which pops the previous color, so now its more like html’s span, than the terminal escape sequences which just override the previous. I’ll ofcourse use this in the statusline, in help screens, and also in some way in textview, and somehow even in messages, alerts, messageboxes etc. It’s still rough, does no checking for mistakes and I don’t have a routine to wrap text ignoring the color stuff. That will be needed soon.

Edit: I’ve also now added ANSI formatted text in textview

5:39am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZSxlQyBRvjlh
September 17, 2011
porting to ffi-ncurses

I’ve been working on porting the rbcurse gem to ffi-ncurses, since ncurses gems is so so hard to install for a lot of people. Thanks to Sean’s support the work and retesting was actually very little. It’s just that there is a lot of testing to do with all the programs, widgets. Sean is coming out with a version 0.4.0 which I am using. rbcurse 1.3.0 onwards uses ffi-ncurses.

2:24am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZSxlQy9cN339
September 17, 2011
App.rb confirm before quit

App should be able to configure whether it wants quit-confirm. Or a procedure to call before quitting, such as saving values. It’s okay for demos where there’s no state to just press F1 or q or C-q to quit.

2:21am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZSxlQy9cMosC
December 1, 2010
calcurse

Just installed calcurse (port) and was checking the UI. Neat. Some salient points: 1. Windows or panels. Standard with title, title border, border color changes when focus in panel or box (that’s because it keeps updating time and thereofre cursor remains on status bar) 2. 2 bottom lines for keys like we have (keylabels) 3. 3rd last row is a sort of status bar like emacs and vim have 4. Data entry in last 2 rows. 2nd last has prompt, last has entry or edit 5. Similarly menu options selected in last row. A page comes with options, letter indexed. 6. Allows layout change of panels. 7. Allows color change, immediate change. Displays colors rather than name. Color chooser for BG and FG.

8:27am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZSxlQy1wn4VK
November 20, 2010
gmail style email completion

I’ve just implemented some gmail style email completion. As you type in a field, values are shown in a window. You can key UP or DOWN, or keep typing. Pressing ENTER selects highilghted value. You can enter multiple emails in one field and get help on each. However, in this case, the window is not modal, so the form below is painting itself. There are still some old widgets like Label and Field (perhaps button) that keep repainting redgarldess of whether changed. This overrides the non-modal window. I’ve just fixed field but putting a @repaint_required == true check in repaint. Also, i think its possible, that rcommandwindow does a repaint and panel update more often than required. its called in different ways, interactive and non-interactive. Need to look into that at some time.

3:00am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZSxlQy1WvLDm
November 4, 2010
rmessagewindow

Regarding bottomline and rmessagewindow I was thinking that if i try to do bottomline in a separate window that just pops up and goes off, then i don’t have to worry about having a window handle (since a new window is created with each call). I tried out this approach with rmessagewindow. However, first of all one has to press a key to make the message go off. Secondly, when the window goes off, so does the message. Whatever was there before remains. Which is great if that’s what you need. (But we already have alert() and rdialog for that). This is fine for accepting input at screen bottom, but after ask() we still want to display some message like “file written” and let it be there. Which means i still have to write to existing window, so my problem remains. I need to have handle of existing window. I’ve added a bottomline object in each window when we create so we can use it as @window.ask, @window.agree. When you use App, you automatically get ask() connected to the root window, but what happens when one App calls another App!! However, i really like how i can do a ‘M-x’ (taken from memacs), and then tab to see available commands. This way user does not need to remember key combinations.

3:00am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZSxlQy1O4y4R
October 28, 2010
single and multiple selection and keys

If single selection (by spacebar) then pressing spacebar and pressing Enter should typically have same action. i.e. select current row and fire_event.(X)

If multiple selection, then Enter typically fires an action for current row such as opening an item or giving more details for that item. Spacebar selects multiple items (or Ctrl-Spacebar), and other keys will execute some action on selected rows (like delete, flag, move etc). 

(X) Exceptions: in tree, Enter collapses or expands, and selects current row, whereas spacebar only selects and displays in other window. Spacebar does not expand or collapse tree node. Typically in multiple select, spacebar selects first row (deselecting others) and Ctrl-Spacebar continues selection. Have to check this out with Listbox. including ListSelectable should take care of most of this.

1:44pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZSxlQy1KwweM
October 20, 2010
Usage of preferred_size

when the user may resize a component, or columns in a components, or user may specify widths or heights, we should use a preferred_width field. When we calculate width, use preferred_width if present, else calculate it. Program never updates preferred_width. However, the question is what when a user resizes a component or sub-component. We want to respect that and not overwrite. So currently, i suggest that we update preferred_width on resizing, dragging etc. This does mean that the original specified width is lost, so a reset_to_preferred_sizes is not possible.

3:37am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZSxlQy1Gvglz
October 18, 2010
color_pair added to widget

Now we may directly pass a color_pair to a widget when creating. This way we can create one color_pair and pass it to multiple widgets, rather than passing actual colors to each. Also, this is a tad more efficient since the color won’t be calculated each time a repaint is done.

1:36pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZSxlQy1GAIs0