Hello qemu, I made this simple curses/ncurses interface for qemu. If anyone is interested in using it, I attach a patch, relative to CVS version from some two days ago. I think it is also safe to apply to the CVS, if you think this is a useful addition (which I think it is). I tried to make it rather portable, but I've only been able to test it on Linux and FreeBSD i386 (only ncurses) so I suppose it works on all unix, but I have no idea how ms windows would deal with it. There's a curses implementation for windows called PDcurses and it should be fine, but if the "configure" doesn't detect any curses library on the system, it will just compile without the curses driver, like if it wasn't there.
About how it works: It adds a "-curses" command line switch which will suppress the SDL driver (just like "-nographics"). When qemu is running with "-curses" it displays everything in the current terminal, be it native console, linux framebuffer, xterm, or running over ssh, leaving the task of rendering characters to the terminal. This results in much less speed overhead compared to the SDL driver (this is important on my slow machine). This works as long as the virtual graphics adapter is in text-mode. When it switches to graphics, qemu displays something like "1024 x 768 Graphics mode" in the middle of the screen, until the virtual machine goes back to a text-mode. Similarly works the VGA Blank mode. The qemu consoles work just like with the SDL interface, except you switch them with Alt+Number instead of Ctrl+Alt+Number because ncurses doesn't detect Ctrl and Alt keys together. So usually the virtual machine screen is at Alt+1, the qemu console at Alt+2, serial console at Alt+3 and parallel console at Alt+4. Resizing the terminal (like when resizing the xterm window) is handled (at least with ncurses, this may not be implemented in other curses libraries). The virtual machine won't notice any resizing, only thing that changes is the portion of the screen displayed in the terminal. Normal text-mode character attributes are handled. I think these are the most important things to mention. Tell me if anything needs to be changed in the patch, then I will send corrected versions. I hope this is useful, greetings, Andrzej Zaborowski -- balrog 2oo5 Dear Outlook users: Please remove me from your address books http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=03/08/21/143258
qemu-curses-ui.patch
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