Hi David,

I appreciate the kind words, but my library isn't suitable for standardization for those reasons you gave, plus I can come up with a few more. =)

A) As you say, I don't use a namespace (my priority is reducing complexity for students), B ) I don't use termcap to test what sort of capabilities the terminal has (we all use PuTTY so I assume it or another modern terminal is being used), C) I have no idea how to make such a thing work on Windows, and D) as you say it is more like a C library than a C++ library. If you want to use the library in your proposal, in part or whole, you have my blessing. Or contact me offline and we can work together on it!

As to the other people talking about the usefulness of text, hmm, well, as long as text is the only means in the standard for doing I/O to a screen, I think it's probably a good idea to add quality of life improvements to it. Color is nice and useful (g++ just added color output to its error and debug messages a version or two back and it really helps), but IMO non-blocking I/O is even more important. I made the colors library since I get asked repeatedly by my students how to do things like read an arrow key press (which, let's be honest, is a really basic thing) but C++ doesn't support in the standard library. Before I wrote the colors library I had to point them at NCURSES, with the attending problems for first semester students.


Bill Kerney
Clovis Community College