TL;DR

Playing with Curses in Perl is funny

From time to time I re-discover the Curses library, mostly because I always dreamt of doing a decent game of any kind. It’s now time to blog an example boilerplate starter so that I don’t have to figure it out time and again.

Installing

I will now play the jolly card and let me be very, very lazy:

# save as "cpanfile"
requires 'Curses';

# ensure you have a system-wide ncurses library with dev stuff and
# run either of these:
# 
#    carton
#    cpanm -l local --installdeps .

Ok, ok… here’s a few links to the tools used above (again, you only need to choose one):

• Carton
• Cpanminus

Boilerplate

This can be a handy starter:

curses-program-starter.pl 409 B

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use 5.024;
use warnings;
use experimental qw< postderef signatures >;
no warnings qw< experimental::postderef experimental::signatures >;
use Curses;

my $win = Curses->new;
curs_set(0);       # don't show the cursor
noecho();          # don't echo keypresses on screen
cbreak();          # get anything unbuffered
$win->keypad(1);

# ... now use $win for most things

END {
   endwin();
}

If not shown for any reason, find the above snippet locally.

I guess this is it!

Hopefully, more on Curses will follow, but until then… happy hacking!