Hello everyone!

I decided to learn ncurses a few days ago so I can do a project I’ve been thinking about lately, and in the process I figured since I’ll go to the trouble of solving a bunch of the problems with writing relatively complicated TUIs with ncurses, I might as well generalise the solutions into a library or two for future me and anyone else who will find them useful.

Anyway, enough introduction, heres what I want to do with the library:

I want it to dynamically manage size and position of ncurses windows. This means windows should be able to be added, and removed (just those for now, I don’t know if I’ll implement resizing windows from the perspective of someone using the library to have that functionality), and have the size and position of the windows update automatically.

Initially I thought a binary space partitioning tree situation might be a good way to tackle this, but I want it to be a bit more flexible. For example, the dev using the library should be able to set certain windows to behave differently than leaves in a bsp (think persistent status bar at the bottom of the application, taking up the entire width but only a couple lines in height for example, or toggle-able file explorer on the left/right of the application like neovim’s NERDTree).

How would you guys go about designing something like this, while still keeping the code relatively simple and efficient?

Here is a badly drawn diagram of what I mean:

Steps here refer to how someone using the library might go about creating each element (window) of their UI in their own project.

Until step 4 a bsp tree makes sense, but after that when I want to add a window which doesnt conform to the rules of a bsp tree, it gets a bit difficult.

Also, Im thinking there should be some way for windows to have some idea of their neighbours so that when a change occurs, they can adapt to it.

Anyways, essentially I’m looking for your thoughts on how you would go about implementing something like this.

Much appreciated!