To-do list (possibilities)

[Bill-Gray]

I don't expect to do anything with this project for a while (way behind on other projects). By the time I do, I may well have completely forgotten all of the following. This will serve as an aide memoire if that happens. But you can be pretty sure that none of it is going to happen any time soon... well, if it does, the credit will go to somebody else.

It is in absolutely no order whatsoever (and at least some open issues would take priority). Please feel free to add to the list or tackle items on the list, but this is mostly just something to remind me a few months/years from now of possible projects.

(Updated 2022 July 13, and again 2025 November 27, to remove items that have actually been done, and to add Web-based port idea.)

• I got a start on code to configure curses.h; see issue #133 and search for 'a bit of code to configure/reconfigure'. Ideally, if you ran make with a particular combination of WIDE, UTF8, DLL_BUILD, etc. flags, curses.h would be appropriately modified. In some ways, this one isn't a big deal. config_curses works quite well. It's just that PDCursesMod has a lot of ports and makefiles to test.
• Pull out PSF/PSF2 font handling from the framebuffer port, put it into the common directory, and modify the DOSVGA and possibly SDL1 and SDL2 ports to make use of it. This is largely in the category of eliminating redundant code; we currently have two different implementations of PSF parsing, and SDL1/2 get fonts (in 8-bit character mode) from a .BMP file with no counterpart in the rest of the universe. (See issue #208 for further discussion of this.)
• After or in parallel to that : the framebuffer port has a built-in PSF font as a static array, and the ability to load one or more PSF fonts and to switch among them by hitting Alt-Minus. It'd be nice to have a mechanism for specifying fallback fonts ("if you can't get the desired glyph from the default font, look in this one or this one"), with the glyph resized as needed (not really difficult to do). If you use Unifont as your "final fallback", you've got at least a passable glyph for any situation. (At present, only the WinGUI port has a fallback font option.)
• Clipboard functions for the VT port in Linux. The downside to that is that (I think) you have to drag in all the X libraries to do it. We might be able to make that code that is common between the X11 and VT/Linux ports. I've also sometimes wished I had access to both the 'clipboard' and 'selection' buffers (this is a really useful distinction of which Windows, sadly, is unaware).
• A 'touchscreen' mouse mode might be interesting. In this mode, instead of having buttons 1, 2, 3, etc., we would have fingers 1, 2, 3, etc., and they would have press, move, and release events. It would be entirely possible to have "'button` 1 was pressed here, moved here, then 'button' 2 pressed here, both 'buttons' may move around, then one or the other is released." A button 'number' N would simply mean that at the time it was pressed, N-1 other fingers were currently being kept track of. I have a cellphone that runs Linux, and have done no programming on it, but it'd be nifty to run PDCurses programs on it.
• A browser-based port could be interesting. The idea is you get a browser window, and mouse clicks and key hits are passed to a program on a server, which updates HTML text in the browser window. HTML text can, of course, have all the attributes we'd need in terms of color, italic, bold, underlined, etc. This would basically mean you could have a server-based curses program. No real idea on how we'd do that, though.