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  12     <h1>UltraText</h1>
  13     <div class="motto">A terminal UI library</div>
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  16
  17 <h2><a name="Introduction">Introduction</a></h2>
  18 <p>
  19 This library fills the almost empty niche of user interface frameworks for
  20 text-based terminal applications. While graphical user interfaces have
  21 proliferated dramatically, their terminal equivalents have been largely
  22 left behind, creating a shift to graphical interfaces in pretty much all
  23 applications currently under development. This is rather unfortunate, as
  24 the graphical frameworks are considerably larger and slower. There is also
  25 the concern of being locked in to the continued use of X11, a large beast
  26 by itself, and whatever GUI framework has been chosen. Finally, most
  27 applications do not really need the advanced capabilities of graphical
  28 display and could just as easily be ran from the text console without
  29 launching X at all.
  30 </p><p>
  31 Back in the "good old days" of DOS, there were numerous text-based
  32 applications; word processors, spreadsheets, file managers, finance trackers,
  33 telnet clients, and even games. These applications demonstrated that usable
  34 and attractive interfaces are entirely possible to implement in text mode.
  35 In Linux, things have not gone quite so well. Due to a lack of a decent
  36 terminal output library (curses is not one of those), text mode applications
  37 look and act rather poorly under Linux. Some support only monochrome output,
  38 most accept only alphanumeric keys as input, and all keep a flashing cursor
  39 around even when nothing is focused.
  40 </p><p>
  41 In the UltraText library you will find the necessary tools for creating
  42 beautiful and usable text-mode application in the prevalent visual style
  43 of the last days of DOS. That style is typified by Borland's TurboVision
  44 toolkit, although only a few applications actually used that toolkit. It
  45 features a look similar to what we find in GUIs today; windows, menu bars,
  46 dialogs, interactive input fields and other UI elements.
  47 </p><p>
  48 From a programmer's point of view, I have tried to create an interface
  49 similar to that of Microsoft Foundation Classes, with the document-view
  50 architecture and an event-driven environment that takes care of the
  51 low-level details of output rendering, focus management, event routing,
  52 and error reporting.
  53 </p>
  54
  55 <h2><a name="Installation">Installation</a></h2>
  56 <p>
  57 To start with you'll need a decent compiler. gcc 3.4 or later is required
  58 to compile. Then you'll need to download UltraText and its prerequisites:
  59 <ul>
  60     <li><a href="https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=180992">UltraText</a> - the library itself.</li>
  61     <li><a href="https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=76798">uSTL</a> - a small STL implementation.</li>
  62     <li><a href="https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=142338">Useful Terminal IO</a> - the output backend.</li>
  63 </ul>
  64 After installing uSTL and UTIO, unpack UltraText and run:
  65 </p><pre>
  66 ./configure
  67 make install
  68 </pre><p>
  69 configure is not autoconf, but rather a custom program with similar
  70 functionality. <kbd>./configure --help</kbd> lists available options.
  71 You might want to specify a different installation prefix with
  72 <kbd>--prefix=/usr</kbd>; the default destination is /usr/local.
  73 Developers will want to build with <kbd>--with-debug</kbd> to get a lot
  74 of assert error checking, which I highly recommend. If you are the type
  75 to edit configuration manually, it's in Config.mk and config.h.
  76 </p>
  77
  78 <h2><a name="Using">Using it</a></h2>
  79 <p>
  80 Due to the complex nature of user interface specification, it is difficult
  81 to create a simple "hello world" application in a few lines. To get a UI up,
  82 you'll need to create a singleton application object and add at least one
  83 window to the root window. There will eventually be examples showing you
  84 exactly how to do this. For now, the library being still in development,
  85 there is little tutorial documentation. You can look at the doxygen-generated
  86 <a href="html/index.html">class reference</a> and see if you can figure out
  87 how to use it yourself. I am sorry about that.
  88 </p>
  89
  90 <h2><a name="Contact">Bug reporting</a></h2>
  91 <p>
  92 Report bugs through the SourceForge.net UltraText library
  93 <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/utui">project page</a> with the
  94 standard bugtracker.
  95 </p>
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