A libcucul and libcaca tutorial

Before writing your first libcaca application, you need to know the difference between libcucul and libcaca :

• libcucul is the text rendering library. It will do all the work you actually need. From imports (text, ANSI, caca internal format, all of this supporting n-bytes unicode), to exports (sames formats, adding SVG, PostScript, TGA, HTML (both 3 and 4), IRC), it'll cover all your needs.
• libcaca handle everything that can be hardware related. It includes display (RAW, X11, OpenGL, Windows (native console), DOS (conio), ncurses, slang, text VGA (IMB-Compatible)), keyboard (same drivers but RAW), mouse (same drivers but RAW and VGA), time and resize events (on windowed drivers).

So, you can write a libcucul only program, but you can't write a libcaca only program, it'll be nonsense. Period.

First, a working program, very simple, to check you can compile and run it:

#include <cucul.h>
#include <caca.h>

int main(void)
{
    /* Initialise libcaca */
    cucul_canvas_t *cv; caca_display_t *dp; caca_event_t ev;
    dp = caca_create_display(NULL);
    if(!dp) return 1;
    cv = caca_get_canvas(dp);
    /* Set window title */
    caca_set_display_title(dp, "Hello!");
    /* Choose drawing colours */
    cucul_set_color_ansi(cv, CUCUL_BLACK, CUCUL_WHITE);
    /* Draw a string at coordinates (0, 0) */
    cucul_put_str(cv, 0, 0, "This is a message");
    /* Refresh display */
    caca_refresh_display(dp);
    /* Wait for a key press event */
    caca_get_event(dp, CACA_EVENT_KEY_PRESS, &ev, -1);
    /* Clean up library */
    caca_free_display(dp);

    return 0;
}

What does it do ? (we skip variable definitions, guessing you have a brain) :

• Create a cucul canvas. A canvas is where everything happens. Writing characters, sprites, strings, images, everything. It is mandatory and is the reason of libcuculs' beeing. Size is there a width of 0 pixels, and a height of 0 pixels. It'll be resized according to contents you put in it.

• Create a caca display. This is basically the window. Physically it can be a window (most of the displays), a console (ncurses, slang) or a real display (VGA).

• Set the window name of our display (only available in windowed displays, does nothing otherwise). (so this is libcaca related)

• Set current colors to black background, and white foreground of our canvas (so this is libcucul related)

• Put a string "This is a message" with current colors in our libcucul canvas.

• Refresh our caca display, whish was firstly attached to our canvas

• Wait for an event of type "CACA_EVENT_KEY_PRESS", which seems obvious.

• Free display (release memory)

• Free canvas (release memory and close window if any)

You can then compile this code under UNIX-like systems with following command : (you'll need pkg-config and gcc)

gcc `pkg-config --libs --cflags cucul caca` example.c -o example