Comment by jart
5 years ago
Author here. We're living in the most exciting time for developing terminal applications. When Microsoft unexpectedly added support for VT100 and XTERM codes to CMD.EXE it totally changed the equation and ANSI became universal for the first time. Blinkenlights is an example of a TUI application I created using Cosmopolitan and it literally works everywhere. https://justine.lol/blinkenlights/index.html You don't need curses. All that's needed is an ioctl() call which flips a bit in termios. Cosmopolitan polyfills that across operating systems. Another cool example of a demo app is this conway's game of life tui gui: https://justine.lol/apelife/index.html
Does that remove full binary compatibility for those running on older OS from Microsoft with an older cmd.exe?
Cosmopolitan supports Windows 7. The WinMain() polyfill is programmed to gracefully fall back if ANSI isn't available. So the binary still loads fine. You just need to run it in something like MinTTY instead if your TUI program is run on an old version of Windows.