Path: utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!scs!spl1!laidbak!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!necntc!ima!cfisun!lakart!dg
From: dg@lakart.UUCP (David Goodenough)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Multi-process curses?
Message-ID: <143@lakart.UUCP>
Date: 31 May 88 13:49:33 GMT
Article-I.D.: lakart.143
References: <687@vsi.UUCP>
Distribution: comp
Organization: Lake - The systems people
Lines: 25

From article <687@vsi.UUCP>, by friedl@vsi.UUCP (Stephen J. Friedl):
>      Generally speaking, we want curses to know about the other
> sessions.  If we put curscr in shared memory (again, speaking
> generally), and can "somehow" link the various windows structures
> together, with a little mutex around the shared access, it seems
> that this could be extended generally to a pretty slick little
> windowing system where child curses processes would be largely
> unaware that they were running in a multi-process environment.
> Has anybody done this?  Are we out of our minds?

Basically, as I read it, you want several processes to be able to output to
curses and have everything look sensible. Why not create a "curses server"
which uses a socket / named pipe mechanism to receive curses requests, and
then does them. That way you only have one "curses environment", but it
fields all the requests. As to the exact nature of a request I'll leave that
for you to decide (I am not going to do system design for a software package
based on a single screen description :-) :-), but with a scheme such as
this it should be possible.

	Comments (Flames :-) anyone?
-- 
	dg@lakart.UUCP - David Goodenough		+---+
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