Make non-fullscreen apps possible

What I’m Looking For

I’m interested in drawing controls over the current terminal, instead of switching away to a completely different screen.

What I’ve Tried

I’ve tried just about everything I can think of, but I always end up with a terminal full of blue. I’m on Windows 10, .NET 4.7.1.

• Creating a new Toplevel with a frame of 100x1 and using that with Application.Run
• I thought maybe the Init() call was goofing me up, so I tried subclassing Toplevel and setting those values myself, then using that subclass with Application.Run<T> to use the Func<Toplevel> overload of Application.Init
• A variety of Window or Toplevel instances that set the bounds smaller than the terminal extents

I didn’t see anything in the docs or any Google results or any Stack Overflow tags. Am I just missing it? Or is this not supported? (If not, I can fill out an enhancement issue 😁)

Thanks!

[migueldeicaza]

What we could do is ensure that the Toplevel only takes over a part of the screen, and that it does not go beyond it - at least this should be possible on Windows. To complete the story, we could retrieve the contents of the screen and store them while we run and restore them on exit.

This gave me the idea: instead of making the code work with a subset of the screen, we could have a “PreviousScreenshotView” that is a view that gets loaded with the original contents - this would allow for example to have views that can change size, windows popup and other things, without having to worry about not touching something in particular.

On shut down, this view could repaint the original contents.

This on Windows should be pretty easy.

For Unix, I never thought this could be possible, but then I remembered that in xterm and newer terminals there is a way of retrieving the contents of the terminal. This is what various test-suites use to validate that terminals use.

While this would be limited to xterm-like terminals, I think Windows + xterm should cover pretty much anything out there. The only Unix challenge would be to precisely map the previous screen attributes to ncurses attributes, but that is a minor problem.

[tthiery]

I would love using a terminal roughly like that …

$ cat log.log
A
B
C
D
E
$ dotnet run app-with-gui.cs
==================================================================
| What is your favourite color: _Purple__________                |
| What is your favourite pet:   _Dog_____________                |
| [Save] [Cancel]                                                |
==================================================================
$ wc Program.cs
234134

I tried Specte.Console as an alternative but that library is not supporting multi-widget re-rendering and is more focused on outputting information. I want to use one of the two libraries to built a console UI for a work item library.