Becoming a Real Curses Application?

[LegalizeAdulthood]

Right now, trn scrapes a bunch of terminal strings from the termlib library (see Tgetstr) in terminal.cpp and uses the individual escape sequences at various parts of the program to perform special effects like drawing the article references tree. Otherwise, all the output is just printf to the console.

I think the main reason for the scraping of the control sequences is just so that printf, puts and putchar can be used all over the place for performing any output and not having to worry about curses. Technically, trn doesn't need curses, just the underlying termcap library, but since the termcap library on modern systems is always packaged with curses, there doesn't seem much point in not using curses at this point. I'm not sure of the history, but perhaps curses was a commercial product at one point and wasn't wide available.

Should trn become a full-blown curses application?

What do you think?

[LegalizeAdulthood]

I just noticed that by using plain ole printf, that previous articles are available in the scrollback buffer of a terminal emulator. Of course, on a real terminal that would be gone unless the terminal implemented a scrollback buffer. So maybe that is one point in favor of printf and against curses.