Curses::Toolkit is a Perl module to build ncurses based applications.

1. Curses::Toolkit
FOSDEM 2011
dams - FOSDEM’11

2. Who I am
• I‘m dams (Damien Krotkine)
• french Perl Monger, doing Perl stuff for many
years (at work and at home)
• not good at blogging, twittering, etc ☺
dams - FOSDEM’11

3. This talk
• Commercial breaks
• slides
• demonstration ( the fun part )
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4. Commercial breaks
☺ ☺
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5. • Part of the French Perl Mongers
• We have a cool logo
• organizing the FPW 2011 ➸ Paris, be there !
• http://journeesperl.fr/fpw2011
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6. • Cool Perl centric company
• sponsored me
• they are hiring two Perl devs & one dba
• http://weborama.com
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7. • Effortless Web Framework for Perl
• easy, powerful, flexible, stable
• nice community
• http://perldancer.org
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8. • All about modern Perl
• french book
• 4 authors (including me)
• 450 pages
• available here, go buy it !
• http://perlmoderne.fr
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9. End of Commercials
☹ ☠☢☣ ☹
dams - FOSDEM’11

10. Curses::Toolkit
• do you use a Terminal ?
• do you know ncurses ?
• do you know GTK / QT ?
• Curses : perl binding
• Curses based Toolkit in Perl,
inspired by GTK
dams - FOSDEM’11

11. 1. History of
Curses::Toolkit
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12. History
• I’ve been doing ncurses based stuff before
• some Gentoo Linux app, like profuse
• RT::Client::Console for Venda(tm)
dams - FOSDEM’11

15. Existing solutions Issues
• Curses module on CPAN not good enough
• Curses : too low level
• Curses::UI : buggy, absolute coordinates,
event loop not flexible
• Curses::Widget : horrible API, event loop
too simple, Widget::Forms too heavy
• damned manual hellish coordinates
calculation !
dams - FOSDEM’11

16. Curses::Toolkit
• a true toolkit, with widgets and events
• OO hierarchy.
• events : keyboard, mouse, timers, etc
• Fully themable
• POE based event loop
• no damned manual hellish coordinates
calculation anymore !
dams - FOSDEM’11

17. 2. Concepts
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18. Terminal
Root window
Window
Label
Widget

19. Widget::Label
everything goes through
theme
the theme
screen

20. Root window
Window1 Window2
Box
Border Button
Label

21. Object Hierarchy
Curses::Toolkit::Widget
|
+-- Curses::Toolkit::Widget::Label
|
+-- Curses::Toolkit::Widget::Entry
|
+-- Curses::Toolkit::Widget::Scrollbar
| |
| +-- Curses::Toolkit::Widget::HScrollbar
| |
| +-- Curses::Toolkit::Widget::VScrollbar
|
+-- Curses::Toolkit::Widget::Container
|
+-- Curses::Toolkit::Widget::HBox
|
+-- Curses::Toolkit::Widget::VBox
|
+-- Curses::Toolkit::Widget::Paned
| |
| +-- Curses::Toolkit::Widget::HPaned
| |
| +-- Curses::Toolkit::Widget::VPaned
|
+-- Curses::Toolkit::Widget::Bin
|
+-- Curses::Toolkit::Widget::Border
|
+-- Curses::Toolkit::Widget::Window
|
+-- Curses::Toolkit::Widget::Button
|
+-- Curses::Toolkit::Widget::GenericButton
|
+-- Curses::Toolkit::Widget::ProgressBar
|
+-- Curses::Toolkit::Widget::HProgressBar
|
+-- Curses::Toolkit::Widget::VProgressBar
dams - FOSDEM’11

22. Signals
• signals can com from
• keyboards
• mouse
• timer
• terminal resize
• they are sent back and forth to POE
• simply use signal_connect( signal => sub { } )
dams - FOSDEM’11

23. Cool stuff
• Windows
• have animated titles
• can be moved / resized (with mouse too)
• labels
• can wrap, be justified
• support tagging (colors, bold...) like GTK
• entries
• support shortcuts
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24. 3. Code
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25. my $root = POE::Component::Curses->spawn;
my $window = Curses::Toolkit::Widget::Window->new;
my $label = Curses::Toolkit::Widget::Label->new;
$root->add_window( $window );
$window->add_widget( $label );
$window->set_coordinates( x1 => 0, y1 => 0,
x2 => 40, y2 => 20 );
POE::Kernel->run;

26. POE::Component::Curses->spawn
->add_window(
Curses::Toolkit::Widget::Window
->new()
->set_coordinates(x1 => 0, y1 => 0,
x2 => 40, y2 => 20)
->add_widget(
Curses::Toolkit::Widget::Label
->new()
)
);
POE::Kernel->run;

27. DEMO
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28. Thanks !
• Curses::Toolkit on CPAN
• http://damien.krotkine.com/blog
• http://github.com/curses-toolkit
dams - FOSDEM’11