Curses

Unicode Logo

I have been working a little program to solve the domino puzzle Stu posted last week. Why push dominos around for minutes when I can spend hours writing a program to solve it in milliseconds? Yeah, well, we all have our faults.

So I've got the program pretty much working, but I thought it might be nice to display the results graphically. Yes, html is glorious, put I don't want to open that can of worms. If I could just find the codes for the old IBM PC box drawing characters, I could cobble something together that would be adequate.

So I went rooting around on the net, and because I am using Linux, whenever I asked for box drawing characters and Linux, I got ncurses, which stands for new curses, which is some kind or proto-windowing system for terminals. I go round and round with this for a while, but never get anywhere because none of the sample programs will compile because I don't have some unspecified library installed. I eventually realized that the C programming language, my text editor and Linux in general all work perfectly well with unicode characters and I don't have any need for ncurses at all.

I've probably been down this road before, but I'll be durned if I can remember where. In any case, I wrote a little program to turn unicode values into unicode character strings and uploaded it to github.

Stackexchange is useless. It is occupied by gnome-like creatures who know everything there is to know, but are incapable of answering a simple question.