Curses overlay on existing screen content

Curses overlay on existing screen content

[Zach Riggle]

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Hello all!

I'm new to curses and was playing around with zsh/curses, but it seems that
the screen will always clear on init and end -- there's no way to create a
"window" at the bottom of the screen and persist its contents after "end".

Is this true, or am I holding this wrong?

*Zach Riggle*

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Re: Curses overlay on existing screen content

[Bart Schaefer]

On Fri, Aug 19, 2022 at 1:16 PM Zach Riggle <zachriggle@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm new to curses and was playing around with zsh/curses, but it seems that the screen will always clear on init and end -- there's no way to create a "window" at the bottom of the screen and persist its contents after "end".

This is going to depend entirely on the implementation of endwin() in
whatever curses library zsh is linked against; "zcurses end" merely
invokes that.

You might be able to fool it by sending some explicit control
sequences to tell the terminal to change the viewport first ... or
just never call "zcurses end" and shuffle the cursor position etc.
around yourself once you are seeing what you want.

Ultimately it would be nice to add "scr_dump" or "putwin" to zcurses
so you could dump the screen to a file and then slurp it in after
"end", but it looks like (web search) ncurses doesn't implement those
functions yet anyway?