Question

I’m working on a toy project, implementing a desktop client of the popular card game Dominion. I thought it would be interesting to display the UI in the terminal, using the ncurses library.

I need to display things like the player’s hand, cards they’ve played, and cards they can buy. I envisioned displaying these as ncurses menus, arranged inline on the screen.

What I can’t figure out is how to communicate focus to the user. For example,

|          |  |               |
|  Copper  |  |  >Adventurer< |
|  Copper  |  |   Chapel      |
|  Copper  |  |   Moat        |
| >Copper< |  |   Thief       |
|  Copper  |  |               |
|          |  |               |
|          |  |               |

Populated menus have the cursor activated (symbolized by the > < entries) when the menu is visible. I want to be able to have one menu active at once, by having one visible or otherwise special cursor that I can build the workflow around.

How can I do this? At the highest level what I want is to have lists of items on the screen, where the user can make selections based on the logic I’ve set up.

Answer 1

ncurses allows you to mess with the coloring of menus using functions like set_menu_fore, set_menu_back and set_menu_grey. This is the route I took. Another idea I had (but later decided against due to too much bookkeeping) was to recolor the menu windows using wattron and wattroff.