Making UI for console application

Question

How can I make an interface for console applications to make them look like edit.com under Microsoft's operating systems. Target languages are C, C++ and C#.NET.

Answer 1

That would be based on a very simple framework which writes directly to the video to draw the underlying shadows, drop down menus, etc, not alone that, since 'Edit.com` would be written in assembler for speed in relation to drawing, this is quite ancient by today's standards, you can however take a look at PDCurses which will enable you to do this kind of thing.

The neat beauty is, PDCurses is compatible with the unix equivalent of Curses.

But, really, today, it is all about GUI and Windows....

What kind of application are you trying to do?

IIRC, from my old days, there was an object orientated framework for this using TurboVision, which has a port available with open source now, see this wikipedia entry on this TurboVision.

Answer 2

Have a look at curses: e.g.: http://sourceforge.net/projects/curses-sharp/

Answer 3

The edit.com window you are showing appear to be developed with Turbo Vision, an old console gui library written by Borland many years ago.

Borland put the software in public domain and release its C++ sources. There is also a porting to Pascal, developed by the community, called Free Vision.

Unfortunately ,I don't think there is a porting or a wrapper to dot.net, so you have to write your own. Or, at least, you can look at the sources to get inspired...