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by cek 1348 days ago
This is NOT "literally a port of an older curses lib to the latest .net". It is a complete API for building terminal UI applications using .NET that leverages curses under the covers when running in a non-Windows environment (on Windows it uses the native Windows console APIs).

For completeness, Terminal.Gui is built on top of a "Console Abstraction Layer" (CAL; I just invented that term), via the "ConsoleDriver" base class. There are four subclasses provided:

- CursesDriver: Uses curses and is the default on Linux/Mac.

- WindowsDriver: Uses the Windows console API and is the default on Windows (only works on Windows)

- NetDriver: Uses the .NET console API and works on all platforms

- FakeDriver: Used for unit testing.

NetDriver is the slowest. WindowsDriver is the fastest. CursesDriver is the biggest bugfarm ;-).
1 comments
alkonaut 1348 days ago
I only meant port of a curses based lib as in “This is an updated version of gui.cs that Miguel wrote for mono-curses in 2007”

so it would be natural that it’s still a normal keyboard-first terminal ui lib because gui.cs was. Would be pretty strange if this took a whole different direction or scope and became a WinForms-in-the-terminal. Can’t see anything in the video, source or history that suggests that it’s anything but a terminal ui only adapted for more targets other than curses.

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cek 1348 days ago
Terminal.Gui really has become "WinForms-in-the-terminal". A lot of the capabilities borrow from WinForms and other popular GUI frameworks. We're not afraid of plagerising.

Check out the list of built-in View classes:

https://gui-cs.github.io/Terminal.Gui/articles/views.html

I'll work on updating the history section of the README to make this more clear.

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