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I have a bare-bones Linux distro running on a machine connected to a laser. I want to develop an interface which allows me to:

  1. Configure settings for the laser (e.g. toolbars and buttons)
  2. Display the current path of the laser (e.g. graphics window)

Since these are bare-bones machines, I don't have X11 installed. I figured that perhaps I could use ncurses to develop a cross-platform interface to configure the settings for the laser, and use SDL to draw arcs and lines to represent the path of the laser.

While I'm comfortable using ncurses and SDL independently, I'm having trouble figuring out how to embed the SDL graphics within an ncurses window.

Is it possible to embed a graphics window (not necessarily SDL) into an ncurses application? If not, is there a cross-platform alternative to ncurses which will do what I need without X11?

Vilhelm Gray
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  • There are numerous lightweight alternatives to make embedded GUIs that I think will be a lot easier to work with than combining two technologies that are not sufficiently aware of each other to be easily combinable... Some inspiration here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2997648/gui-library-for-microcontroller . There are even some that sit on top of SDL – fvu Jul 17 '13 at 14:28
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    Why not do it all in SDL? It's cross platform. – parkydr Jul 18 '13 at 11:46
  • @parkydr Yes, I'm considering using an SDL GUI library (perhaps AGAR), but I'm not sure yet whether there will be any significant additional overhead in implementing everything in SDL. – Vilhelm Gray Jul 18 '13 at 12:42

1 Answers1

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The Ncurses project appears focused on developing a library for the construction of text-based user interfaces. As such, I do not believe there currently is, nor is planned to be, support for embedding an SDL graphical context.

I would suggest looking into other options such as the AGAR library which enables the creation of graphical user interfaces within SDL.

Vilhelm Gray
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