Friday, December 26, 2008

Portable Terminal I/O with SCUD

A new release will be uploaded, today, 0.4.1, with some minor bugfixes and a simple terminal abstraction library, "lib/scud." This library supports cursor relocation, changing terminal colors, and clearing the screen on both VT100-capable terminals and Windows. Also, a new primitive has been added, "unbuffer-console", which puts the Windows and UNIX standard input into a raw, unbuffered mode. This makes it possible to capture individual keypresses by the user without waiting for linebreaks.

Why the fuss with terminals? Because I have been working on a lot of console mode applications, and this module gives me the bare minimum while supporting both Windows and UNIX platforms. There is still a lot of planning and work ongoing with 0.5, but not much of it is suitable for release, yet.

Happy holidays!