croatoan is a set of bindings to the ncurses terminal library for
Common Lisp.

It is inspired by, but not derived from, cl-ncurses and cl-charms.

Its main goal is to provide a higher-level, lispy/CLOSy interface,
whereas the existing bindings clone the cryptic C API.

As of now, the library is in an early, but hopefully usable stage. 
Ncurses is old and huge and it will take a while to cover completely.

The API is not yet stable.

It is developed and tested on Ubuntu 16.04 x86_64 and SBCL 1.5.7.

The only supported ncurses version is 6.x --with-abi-version=6.
Version 5.9 mostly works, but I will focus new efforts on 6.x.

Since many popular distributions ship ncurses --with-abi-version=5,
for full compatibility (wide characters, 256 colors and extended
mouse support), you will have to manually build ncurses 6.x.

The documentation is currently provided by the commented examples.

You are welcome to contribute and any form of help would be greatly
appreciated.

--

Since ncurses is not thread-safe, all IO has to occur in the main
thread of the REPL running in a terminal.

This makes it difficult to interact with ncurses from the Emacs SLIME
REPL which runs in its own thread.

A workaround is to pass all ncurses IO to the main thread via a
thread-safe queue. Basic support for this has been implemented.

A tutorial on interacting with ncurses from swank/slime is available
in docs/slime.md
