change curse lib. from ncurses to notcurses.

[yuriharrison1]

should be very nice if change the curse lib to notcurses. it provide much better looking and it work much better for ta bar, views etc. i think it will be very good for the project. What you guys think.

[orbitalquark]

If notcurses provides a curses-compatible API, then it could possibly be a drop-in replacement. Otherwise, making the switch would essentially be a complete rewrite: the Scintilla editing component that Textadept uses would need a new platform layer, the Curses Development Kit (CDK) for UI widgets would need a replacement, and Textadept's curses calls would need to be rewritten.

[yuriharrison1]

notcurses isn't curse compatible. need to rewrite. I now its a lot o work. but the resulte is a betterlooking and a better to maintain. maybe in the future. thanks anyway.

[M0JXD]

I have considered this too, it might be nice on Windows as the pdcurses version does not seem to have syntax highlighting. A library like notcurses also makes it easier to do more with less code, e.g. it may be possible to bring a menubar to the terminal version within Textadept's 2000LOC per platform limit.

However, curses is the historical defacto TUI library, so using it gives Textadept's terminal version great portability. On the converse, notcurses does not support OpenBSD or Haiku, both places Textadept has been run on in the past.

As an aside, it was raised as to whether Scinterm (the Scintilla platform for Textadept's curses version) should better support X/Open curses, which would only matter for "true" Unix OSes like Solaris and Illumos distros.