Fwd: ncurses + a newly spawned xterm

[Brad Beveridge]

I originally posted this to the ncurses help list, but that appears to
be ridden with spam with no helpful messages.  I've resent here, sorry
if this is out of scope.

Brad
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Brad Beveridge <address@hidden>
Date: Dec 2, 2005 10:08 AM
Subject: ncurses + a newly spawned xterm
To: address@hidden


Hi all, this is my first post to Ncurses help.  I'll describe what I
my problem is first, since the solution I have in my head may not work
:)  I am using Ubuntu Breezy, BTW.

I am using Lisp, which for me has a console window open already.  I
can run ncurses inside this console fine.  However, I am using a
VILisp (http://vim.sourceforge.net/scripts/script.php?script_id=221)
pipe tool to funnel text through GNU Readline to the Lisp console, the
text either comes from a file pipe (which VIM writes to) or from
STDIN.  Running STDIN through Readline causes all sorts of issues with
ncurses, especially in the raw mode that I want to use (ie, text only
comes through in lines).

So I can either fix the VILisp script (not likely since I know no
Perl, and the author doesn't know how it fix it), or I figure that I
can spawn a new console and use that console for my ncurses
interaction.

After a bit of research, I found
http://cap.anu.edu.au/~wpc/blog/programming/pseudo-terminals.html,
which looks similar to what I want.  Looking further it seems that on
Linux I ought to be able to use forkpty() to create a new pseudo
terminal, and the master/slave descriptors.  I think that I can then
exec xterm from the newly created child process, passing it the master
FD, and setup the Lisp stdin/stdout to use the slave FD.  After all
this setup, can I use ncurses correctly from within my Lisp image and
have the ncurses commands go to the newly spawned xterm?

Please reply directly to me as well as the list - I have subscibed but
I am yet to get a confirm message.

Thanks for your time.

Brad