Any future for curses applications/toolkits like rbcurse?

sentinel · May 10, 2010, 8:13am

Have apps moved over to the web (or GUI) totally ? Will there be any
development on the terminal/console ?

I am honestly and seriously wondering if its worthwhile to keep working
on libraries/toolkits such as rbcurse ?

Although, many of us do use text editors like vim/emacs, and apps such
as alpine/mutt/mc/vifm, and a lot of other command line utilities, but
is there scope for new apps to be written on the terminal/console.

If yes, what are such apps ?

sentinel · May 10, 2010, 1:13pm

On May 10, 2:13 am, “R. Kumar” [email protected] wrote:

If yes, what are such apps ?
Yes, I think this is true. There isn’t much room for curses based
console apps anymore. Heck you can even access a web app via a
terminal using lynx. That’s not to say there aren’t some niche uses
(writing lynx itself for instance). But it is very limited arena at
this point, and not worth the effort (IMHO) unless you have a very
specific need for it.

Console apps that are not curses based, however, are still very useful
and widely used and certainly worth the effort.

sentinel · May 10, 2010, 2:51pm

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 2:13 PM, R. Kumar [email protected] wrote:

Although, many of us do use text editors like vim/emacs, and apps such
as alpine/mutt/mc/vifm, and a lot of other command line utilities, but
is there scope for new apps to be written on the terminal/console.
If yes, what are such apps ?

imho, the reason we do not see much curses apps is because the curses
api interface and/or the installation itself is terrible.

i like the ui of rbcurse, but i find it very difficult to install.
There is ffi-curses, but its ui calls are crude, ergo too slow for
fast scripting devt, ergo not fit for ruby’s oo ease…

let’s take a simple example: a simple program that prompts for the ff:

First Name: __________
Last Name:__________
Userid:__________
Password: __________

without curses-based ui interface, i have to rerun the program again
if i want to change one of those fields. wc is really terrible.

that said, any app i can imagine may have a need for text ui. hands
down, administration/mgt program is one. pls don’t let me run a webgui
or any gui for that matter. i do not do gui on my servers. i only use
ssh, and i find it not only very secure, but also very fast.

thanks and kind regards -botp

ps: are you kumar, the creator of rbcurse?

sentinel · May 10, 2010, 4:28pm

interface and/or the installation itself is terrible.

i like the ui of rbcurse, but i find it very difficult to install.
There is ffi-curses, but its ui calls are crude, ergo too slow for
fast scripting devt, ergo not fit for ruby’s oo ease…

Did you find rbcurse difficult to install, or ncurses? Once ncurses is
installed, then you only have to install the rbcurse gem.

I know, I’ve had a lot of issues installed ncurses gem, most complaints
have to do with that.

The only issue reg. installing rbcurse came when someone had 1.8 and 1.9
on his system, and the gem was installed when he had 1.8 operational,
then he loaded 1.9 and tried to run the programs.

Thanks for your answers.

sentinel · May 10, 2010, 4:31pm

Thomas S. wrote:

Console apps that are not curses based, however, are still very useful
and widely used and certainly worth the effort.

Could you clarify that, i did not understand about “console apps that
are not curses based”. Do you mean the general command line programs –
apps without a screen interface - such as ri, or gem, or rake, etc ?

Thanks.

sentinel · May 10, 2010, 4:31pm

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 12:13 AM, R. Kumar [email protected]
wrote:

Have apps moved over to the web (or GUI) totally ? Will there be any
development on the terminal/console ?

I use irssi almost every day. I wish there were a Ruby equivalent.

sentinel · May 10, 2010, 5:37pm

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 10:28 PM, R. Kumar [email protected]
wrote:

Did you find rbcurse difficult to install, or ncurses? Once ncurses is
installed, then you only have to install the rbcurse gem.

i’m sure ncurses installed fine since ffi-curses works.

ok, just to be sure, i just installed ncurses-1.2.4.gem, and then
rbcurse (as per doc instruction).
i ran the examples and they all failed w the common error

/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/rbcurse-1.1.2/lib/rbcurse/rwidget.rb:29:in
`require’: no such file to load – rbcurse/io (LoadError)

thanks and best regards -botp

sentinel · May 10, 2010, 5:44pm

Thomas S. wrote:

On May 10, 10:31ï¿½am, “R. Kumar” [email protected] wrote:

Could you clarify that, i did not understand about “console apps that
are not curses based”. Do you mean the general command line programs –
apps without a screen interface - such as ri, or gem, or rake, etc ?

Yes.

But I think botp makes a fair point about admin consoles. Though I
suspect even that won’t last for ever.

Thanks for your replies.

Anyway, I will probably keep updating or improving rbcurse to keep in
touch with ruby. I’ll try simplifying, cleaning up, and adding more
keyboard power to the components.

sentinel · May 10, 2010, 5:50pm

botp wrote:

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 10:28 PM, R. Kumar [email protected]
wrote:

Did you find rbcurse difficult to install, or ncurses? Once ncurses is
installed, then you only have to install the rbcurse gem.

i’m sure ncurses installed fine since ffi-curses works.

ok, just to be sure, i just installed ncurses-1.2.4.gem, and then
rbcurse (as per doc instruction).
i ran the examples and they all failed w the common error

/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/rbcurse-1.1.2/lib/rbcurse/rwidget.rb:29:in
`require’: no such file to load – rbcurse/io (LoadError)

thanks and best regards -botp

Oh, thanks for that !!! I have had a lot of issues generating gems,
since whenever I am ready to create a new version, the hoe package has
changed. I must have manually done 1.1.2

I have just yesterday, moved over to jeweler, and i checked the gemspec
created, it does contain io.rb. I shall upload the gem created by
jeweler.

Thanks for pointing out.

sentinel · May 10, 2010, 5:12pm

On May 10, 10:31 am, “R. Kumar” [email protected] wrote:

Could you clarify that, i did not understand about “console apps that
are not curses based”. Do you mean the general command line programs –
apps without a screen interface - such as ri, or gem, or rake, etc ?

Yes.

But I think botp makes a fair point about admin consoles. Though I
suspect even that won’t last for ever.

sentinel · May 10, 2010, 6:00pm

Strange. I cant push a gem even after yanking.

gem yank rbcurse -v 1.1.2
Yanking gem from RubyGems.org…
Successfully yanked gem: rbcurse (1.1.2)

Executing “gem push ./pkg/rbcurse-1.1.2.gem”:
gem push ./pkg/rbcurse-1.1.2.gem
Pushing gem to RubyGems.org…
Repushing of gem versions is not allowed.
Please use gem yank to remove bad gem releases.
rake aborted!
Command failed with status (1): [gem push ./pkg/rbcurse-1.1.2.gem…]

gem yank rbcurse -v 1.1.2
Yanking gem from RubyGems.org…
The version 1.1.2 has already been yanked.

So i’ve pushed 1.1.3 to gemcutter:

Successfully registered gem: rbcurse (1.1.3)

botp, please try it and let me know. Thanks a lot.

sentinel · May 10, 2010, 5:59pm

On 10 May 2010 17:44, R. Kumar [email protected] wrote:

Thanks for your replies.

Anyway, I will probably keep updating or improving rbcurse to keep in
touch with ruby. I’ll try simplifying, cleaning up, and adding more
keyboard power to the components.

Thanks, curses interface is nice and certainly useful.

Still I would like to see an extension that supports utf-8, and I am
not sure that is even reasonably possible in ruby 1.8.

Thanks

Michal

sentinel · May 10, 2010, 6:25pm

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 12:01 AM, R. Kumar [email protected]
wrote:

…
So i’ve pushed 1.1.3 to gemcutter:

Successfully registered gem: rbcurse (1.1.3)

botp, please try it and let me know. Thanks a lot.

i just ran gem update and all samples work like a charm
thanks for rbcurse. i will study it.
btw, your examples require super user power, i have to use sudo
best regards -botp

sentinel · May 10, 2010, 6:27pm

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 12:01 AM, R. Kumar [email protected]
wrote:

Successfully registered gem: rbcurse (1.1.3)

btw, could you also register ncurses-1.2.4 in rubygems?

best regards -botp

sentinel · May 10, 2010, 6:35pm

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 12:24 AM, botp [email protected] wrote:

thanks for rbcurse. i will study it.

of the samples, the viewtodo.rb fails.
it says Errno::ENOENT: No such file or directory - todo.yml

thanks and best regards -botp

sentinel · May 10, 2010, 7:09pm

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 11:01 AM, R. Kumar [email protected]
wrote:

Repushing of gem versions is not allowed.

Successfully registered gem: rbcurse (1.1.3)

botp, please try it and let me know. Thanks a lot.

Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

Hi, it seems to be working on 1.9.1, but I’m having difficulty on 1.8.7.

I think the problem is that 1.8.7 is installed in
/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rbcurse-1.1.3 which doesn’t have write
access to
view.log
The reason 1.9.1 works is because I use RVM, which places it in
~/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.1-p378/gems/rbcurse-1.1.3 since it’s in a subdir
of my
home dir, I think it has write access (sorry if this is way off, Unix
isn’t
my strong point)

Other differences are that when installing for 1.9.1, I had to do “gem
install --local ncurses-0.9.1.gem”, but I was able to get it to work
correctly with “sudo gem install ncurses” for 1.8.7

Here was my 1.8.7 session:

Last login: Sun May 9 11:36:45 on ttys001
Now using system ruby.

11:32 AM ~
â˜sudo gem install ncurses
Password:
Building native extensions. This could take a while…
Successfully installed ncurses-0.9.1
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for ncurses-0.9.1…
Installing RDoc documentation for ncurses-0.9.1…

11:32 AM ~
â˜sudo gem install rbcurse
Successfully installed rbcurse-1.1.3
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for rbcurse-1.1.3…
Installing RDoc documentation for rbcurse-1.1.3…

11:33 AM ~
â˜cd rvm gemdir

11:34 AM /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8
â˜cd gems

11:34 AM /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems
â˜cd rbcurse-1.1.3/

11:34 AM /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rbcurse-1.1.3
â˜cd examples/

11:34 AM /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rbcurse-1.1.3/examples
â˜ruby test2.rb
#<Errno::EACCES: Permission denied - view.log>
“/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/logger.rb:525:in
initialize'\n/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/logger.rb:525:in open’\n/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/logger.rb:525:in
create_logfile'\n/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/logger.rb:520:in open_logfile’\n/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/logger.rb:487:in
initialize'\n/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/logger.rb:263:in new’\n/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/logger.rb:263:in
initialize'\ntest2.rb:26:in new’\ntest2.rb:26”
test2.rb:495: undefined method `debug’ for nil:NilClass (NoMethodError)

11:35 AM /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rbcurse-1.1.3/examples
â˜cd ~

11:36 AM ~
â˜cd deleteme

11:36 AM ~/deleteme
â˜ruby /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rbcurse-1.1.3/examples/test2.rb
/Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in
gem_original_require': no such file to load -- qdfilechooser (LoadError) from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in require’
from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rbcurse-1.1.3/examples/test2.rb:16

11:36 AM ~/deleteme
â˜ruby -v
ruby 1.8.7 (2009-06-08 patchlevel 173) [universal-darwin10.0]

Hope that helps
-Josh

sentinel · May 11, 2010, 9:22am

11:34 AM /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rbcurse-1.1.3/examples
â˜ruby test2.rb
#<Errno::EACCES: Permission denied - view.log>

for the moment, pls do

sudo ruby test2.rb

since view.log is being created. Or else, you could copy the examples
folder to a writable area (/Users/xxx/tmp).

â˜ruby /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rbcurse-1.1.3/examples/test2.rb
/Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in
`gem_original_require’: no such file to load – qdfilechooser
(LoadError)
from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in

Pls cd to the examples folder. In this case, there is a local file
called qdfilechooser.rb (quick dirty filechooser).

sentinel · May 11, 2010, 9:24am

botp wrote:

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 12:24 AM, botp [email protected] wrote:

thanks for rbcurse. ï¿½i will study it.

of the samples, the viewtodo.rb fails.
it says Errno::ENOENT: No such file or directory - todo.yml

thanks and best regards -botp

botp.
I think after all the changes, viewtodo.rb is not functional, and i
thought i had marked that somewhere, perhaps in the readme on github.
Strangely, todo.yml is there in the same folder. Hope you ‘cd’ to the
examples folder.

I’ll try fixing the viewtodo.rb soon.

sentinel · May 10, 2010, 8:52pm

botp wrote:

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 12:01 AM, R. Kumar [email protected]
wrote:

…
So i’ve pushed 1.1.3 to gemcutter:

Successfully registered gem: rbcurse (1.1.3)

botp, please try it and let me know. Thanks a lot.

i just ran gem update and all samples work like a charm
thanks for rbcurse. i will study it.
btw, your examples require super user power, i have to use sudo
best regards -botp

Drat !!! Is that because of the log file being generated ?
Any ideas ?

I test it from my local development folder (under github), my examples
folder is in my User.

I will add todo.yml to the gem, currently the filelist was generated by
jeweler, and it was my first gem from there.

Will check the last issue also. Maybe examples will have to be copied to
a User directory ? Thanks a lot for feedback.
Learning: In future, when i create a gem, i need to install it and test
against it before releasing !

sentinel · May 11, 2010, 9:41am

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 3:24 PM, R. Kumar [email protected] wrote:

I think after all the changes, viewtodo.rb is not functional, and i
thought i had marked that somewhere, perhaps in the readme on github.
Strangely, todo.yml is there in the same folder. Hope you ‘cd’ to the
examples folder.
I’ll try fixing the viewtodo.rb soon.

Hi Kumar,
yes. the viewtodo error should be:
#<NoMethodError: undefined method keys' for #<Array:0x86104f4>> "viewtodo.rb:31:in get_categories’\nviewtodo.rb:93:in
`convert_to_text’.…

no worry though. the examples are more than enough to keep me busy
tinkering w rbcurse.
thanks and best regards -botp