NAME¶
libcaca-tutorial - A libcaca tutorial First, a very simple working program, to
check for basic libcaca functionalities.
#include <caca.h>
int main(void)
{
caca_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);
caca_set_display_title(dp, 'Hello!');
caca_set_color_ansi(cv, CACA_BLACK, CACA_WHITE);
caca_put_str(cv, 0, 0, 'This is a message');
caca_refresh_display(dp);
caca_get_event(dp, CACA_EVENT_KEY_PRESS, &ev, -1);
caca_free_display(dp);
return 0;
}
What does it do?
- •
- Create a display. Physically, the display is either a
window or a context in a terminal (ncurses, slang) or even the whole
screen (VGA).
- •
- Get the display's associated canvas. A canvas is the
surface where everything happens: writing characters, sprites, strings,
images... It is unavoidable. Here the size of the canvas is set by the
display.
- •
- Set the display's window name (only available in windowed
displays, does nothing otherwise).
- •
- Set the current canvas colours to black background and
white foreground.
- •
- Write the string 'This is a message' onto the canvas, using
the current colour pair.
- •
- Refresh the display, causing the text to be effectively
displayed.
- •
- Wait for an event of type CACA_EVENT_KEY_PRESS.
- •
- Free the display (release memory). Since it was created
together with the display, the canvas will be automatically freed as
well.
You can then compile this code on an UNIX-like system using the following
commans (requiring pkg-config and gcc):
gcc `pkg-config --libs --cflags caca` example.c -o example