Curses

Ruby JRuby
1

All -

I’m using curses in a Ruby app to display a periodically updating full
screen text mode interface on an app running on servers without a
graphical
environment.

Curses is included in the standard distribution of MRI Ruby, but I just
tried my app for the first time in JRuby, and it dies when requiring
curses:

LoadError: no such file to load -- curses

Is there a way for me to adapt JRuby to curses, which is, as I
understand
it, a C library?

Thanks,
Keith

2

JCurses, a java console windowing toolkit for Windows and Linux was the first result in a
google search for java curses. There are probably others. Support for
C-Extensions was removed from JRuby1.7.3, I believe. The options that
come
to mind are to use a java lib that provides curses support like the one
I’m
linking, or attempt to use FFI to interact with the C library . I think
wrapping the java lib would be the easier task, personally.

3

There is ffi-ncurses (ffi-ncurses | RubyGems.org | your community gem host), which
runs on both CRuby and JRuby. Not sure how complete it is, but worth
a try.

4

I wrote a very basic curses library targeting Swing… it needs a lot of
improvements, it covers what I needed:

It depends on the features you use.

-Jean

PS: I could improve it.

From: Wayne M. [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Tuesday, August 13, 2013 2:14 AM
Subject: Re: [jruby-user] Curses

There is ffi-ncurses (ffi-ncurses | RubyGems.org | your community gem host), which
runs on both CRuby and JRuby. Not sure how complete it is, but worth
a try.