Thread: Simple Ncurses-Style Text Graphics for Linux

Originally Posted by Traiano

Thanks, Hodor. SDL looks like it will do the trick: You don't need a whole X11 environment to o basic graphics with it, and the documentation looks solid.

Yeah, give it a go. I have a particular fondness for character-based graphics and also pixel primitives like lines, circles, rectangles, etc (I think they're enlightening things to implement) so just give it a shot and ask questions here on the forum If you want to render text/characters I suggest using a VGA/monospace font (there are lots of public domain ones) and converting it to a C array (that's an additional project) so that you can easily build a simple bunch of functions to display text onto your SDL "canvas". To do this you'll have to first implement a function to set a pixel though, but that's easy with SDL. If you want a VGA font already converted to a C array I can probably give you one; each glyph is simply a w*h region in what's sometimes called a spritesheet. It's not the most efficient way to do things, but who cares

Edit: You've posted another response. ncurses for the win! I wrote an entire "ascii art drawing library" (and others here might have as well), so go for it.

Originally Posted by Hodor

Yeah, give it a go. I have a particular fondness for character-based graphics and also pixel primitives like lines, circles, rectangles, etc (I think they're enlightening things to implement) so just give it a shot and ask questions here on the forum If you want to render text/characters I suggest using a VGA/monospace font (there are lots of public domain ones) and converting it to a C array (that's an additional project) so that you can easily build a simple bunch of functions to display text onto your SDL "canvas". To do this you'll have to first implement a function to set a pixel though, but that's easy with SDL. If you want a VGA font already converted to a C array I can probably give you one; each glyph is simply a w*h region in what's sometimes called a spritesheet. It's not the most efficient way to do things, but who cares

Edit: You've posted another response. ncurses for the win! I wrote an entire "ascii art drawing library" (and others here might have as well), so go for it.

For the general benefit of all:

For learning C through the medium of simple 2D graphics, using a library not requiring an X windowing environment on Linux/FreeBSD, AND well documented, Libncurses5/6 is great.
To go with it, there is an excellent 579 page tutorial and reference called "The Programmer's Guide to Ncurses", and I highly recommend it :-)