Re: Screen management in C

On 12/27/24 9:17 AM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

On 12/27/2024 9:24 AM, David Meyer wrote:

If I want to do screen management in a C program on OpenVMS, is it
better to use one of the curses packages in the C run-time library, or
the SMG$ run-time library? If the latter, is there any documentation on
how to call SMG$ routines from C?

 If you do not have any existing code using curses or personal
experience with curses, then I would suggest SMG$.
 There is an entire manual about SMG$:
 https://docs.vmssoftware.com/vsi-openvms-rtl-screen-management-smg-manual/
 There is a C header file with prototypes:
 #include <smg$routines.h>
 Because SMG$ are supporting Pascal/Basic/Cobol/Fortran then
many arguments are pass by descriptor and you will need to setup
those in C, so some familiarity with descriptors will be required.

This has been discussed previously here:
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.vms/c/ufBEqvGdglU
That discussion has pointers to various examples, and Neil Rieck has
another example:
https://neilrieck.net/demo_vms_html/vt_smg_demo_c.html