The Joy of Text
summary
Explains why terminal text handling matters, shows tools used and code that actually works: builds ffi-ncurses because Ruby’s curses lacked Unicode support, uses PTY and expect to drive programs that require a real tty, and demonstrates a working full-screen file viewer and a rog‑like field‑of‑view map. Notes concrete differences (Ruby 1.8.7’s getc implementation is ~5 lines, 1.9.2’s is ~30 with encodings), details escape sequences, terminfo, and why xterm/terminfo and locales must be right for true UTF‑8 output.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Start
- 0:04Sean O'Halpin The JOY of TEXT
- 1:00what is text? ■ strings of characters
- 2:35how does it get into computer?
- 5:00why does vi use hjkl cursor movement? ■touch typing? ■ ergonomics? ■ efficiency?
- 16:26how does text g into your application?
- 16:36how does a keyboard work? ■ key press ■key down
- 24:51what is ncurses? ■fullscreen terminal control libra
- 25:07why ffi-ncurses? ■ because existing ncurses-ruby not support Unicode well
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