Re: [PATCH] ncurses based config V2

Nir Tzachar
2008-09-06T05:42:00Z

Hello.

On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 10:59 PM, Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> On Fri, Sep 05, 2008 at 11:27:00AM +0300, Nir Tzachar wrote:
>> Changes:
>> 1) Fixed segfaults in help window.
>> 2) Removed the instructions window, made the instructions appear as a button
>> which displays a popup window.
>> 3) Added hot keys support. As ncurses does not support several colors inside
>> a menu, keys are highlighted using "()".
>> 4) Optimized for 80x24 terminals.
>> 6) Fixed zconf.y to use _menu_init
>> 7) added nconfig to "make help"
>> 8) Misc fixes.
>>
>> Comments are appreciated.
>
> OK, I've just tried it. Here are the first comments I can make :
>
> - colors are too dark. Cyan on black is barely readable, red on black is
> almost unreadable and blue on black is not readable at all, I have to
> switch off the light to read it. Most often you'll see light shades of
> grey (even white) in interfaces because it's hard to see dark shades,
> and bright flashy letters would dazzle and be seen as fuzzy. Many colors
> are perfectly readable on while or even light grey (except yellow and
> sometimes cyan). Blue backgrounds were often used under DOS and were
> OK with almost all colors except red (well-known eye focus problem).
> But there was a trick, pixels were very large in 640x200, nowaydays
> we have small pixels and letters are not much readable anymore on blue
> backgrounds. For your tests, you can try to load
> xterm -bg <color> -fg <color> and ensure that you're using a medium
> font (tickness of 1-pixel).

The thing with colors is that they are very personal... The colors I
have work great on my terminals. I don't think I can come up with one
scheme which looks nice to everybody, hence the support for color
schemes. If you can come up with a color scheme which works gr8 for
you, I'll be happy to add it. If you are interested, check the
INIT_PAIR macros of the patch.

> - pressing arrows too fast regularly escapes (probably because of the
> ESC prefix, I don't know). This is rather strange, because no other
> application does this to me.

I cannot reproduce this. What terminal emulator are you using, and
which ncurses version? Also, can you please send me the terminal
emulator config file?

> Is there a specific initialization
> sequence with ncurses to state that arrows should return special codes
> instead of the ESC prefix ? (I have no idea)

Yes. You need to specify you want to get keypad events, otherwise they
just appear as ESC.

> - entering text in boxes (eg: local version) does not move the cursor,
> it remains at the beginning of the line. If I press any arrow, the
> box immediately closes (most likely the Esc prefix again).

Fixed.

> - in the input boxes, spaces are missing aroung the title, which touches
> the frame (eg: Local version again).

Fixed.

> - in "instructions", it's not explained how to leave that box. I found
> both Enter and Esc to work, but a last line with a small message would
> be better.

Done.

> - I noticed I was tempted a lot to press "?" to get help, but the key is
> not bound. It would be nice to have it bound to Help since make oldconfig
> and menuconfig to both report help that way.

It was supposed to work, I mistyped '?' with ':' . Fixed.

> - I'm not convinced that the parenthesis around hotkeys make the menu
> that much readable, especially when there are lots of short words or
> even acronyms. Eg :
> [ ] (U)TS namespace
> [ ] (I)PC namespace
> [ ] (U)ser namespace (EXPERIMENTAL)
> [ ] (P)ID Namespaces (EXPERIMENTAL)

I agree, but could not come up with any other visible mark to note the hotkey.

> I don't know if there is something such as a bold attribute in ncurses,
> it would make sense to use it IMHO because you don't force a color on
> people's terms, you rely on the style which works well for them.

There is a bold attribute, but you cannot set it for a single letter
of a menu item, as far as I know.

> I'm sorry I don't go further for now, the arrows causing frequent exits is
> too bothersome, I've started it about 30 times just for this report, it's
> too hard to navigate. I hope that the points above are already helpful.

Thanks for the input. I would really like to solve the issue you have
with arrow keys. Can you also send a trace of key presses which cause
you to exit, and which window is active?

Cheers.