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This interface was created to give NetHack a more featureful text-mode interface, compared to the traditional TTY interface. Also, by making use of the SDL curses of PDCurses, I was able to remove dependence on the underlying terminal entirely, and get a consistent look-and-feel across platforms (e.g. IBMGraphics and the Alt key for extended commands works on both Linux and Windows without any special configuration).

Features

Some features of this interface compared to the traditional tty interface include:

• Dynamic window resizing (e.g. maximizing a terminal window)
• Dynamic configurable placement of status and message windows, relative to the map
• Makes better use of larger terminal windows
• Fancier display (e.g. window borders, optional popup dialogs)
• "cursesgraphics" option for fancier line-drawing characters for drawing the dungeon - this should work on most terminals/platforms
• Ability to compile with PDCurses-SDL for complete terminal independence.

Gameplay

Gameplay should be similar to the tty interface for NetHack; the differences are primarily visual. This windowport supports dynamic resizing of the terminal window, so you can play with it to see how it looks best to you during a game. Also, the align_status and align_message options may be set during the game, so you can experiment to see what arrangement looks best to you.

For menus, in addition to the normal configurable keybindings for menu navigation described in the Guidebook, you can use the right and left arrows to to forward or backward one page, respectively, and the home and end keys to go to the first and last pages, respectively.

Configuration Options

Some configuration options that are specific to or relevant to the curses windowport are shown below. Copy any of these that you like to your nethack configuration file (e.g. .nethackrc for UNIX or NetHack.cnf for Windows):

#
# Use this if the binary was compiled with multiple window interfaces,
# and curses is not the default
OPTIONS=windowtype:curses
#
# Set this for Windows systems, or for PDCurses for SDL on any system.
# The latter uses a cp437 font, which works with this option
#OPTIONS=IBMgraphics
#
# Set this if IBMgraphics above won't work for your system.  Mutually
# exclusive with the above option, and should work on nearly any
# system.
OPTIONS=cursesgraphics
#
# Optionally specify the alignment of the message and status windows
# relative to the map window.  If not specified, the code will default
# to the locations used in the tty interface: message window on top,
# and status window on bottom.  Placing either of these on the right or
# left really only works well for winder terminal windows.
OPTIONS=align_message:bottom,align_status:right
#
# Use a small popup "window" for short prompts, e.g. "Really save?".
# If this is not set, the message window will be used for these as is
# done for the tty interface.
OPTIONS=popup_dialog
#
# Specify the initial window size for NetHack in units of characters.
# This is supported on PDCurses for SDL as well as PDCurses for
# Windows.
OPTIONS=term_cols:110,term_rows:32
#
# Controls the usage of window borders for the main NetHack windows
# (message, map, and status windows).  A value of 1 forces the borders
# to be drawn, a value of 2 forces them to be off, and a value of 3
# allows the code to decide if they should be drawn based on the size
# of the terminal window.
OPTIONS=windowborders:3

Compiling From Source

See the Building page for information on compiling from source on various platforms.

Known Issues

• Resizing windows to a smaller size sometimes causes a crash (PDCurses only)
• Cursor position is wrong on map for smaller terminal windows in all versions of PDCurses (smaller than 80 width or 24 height).

Contact

The curses windowport was written by Karl Garrison. I may be contacted at kgarrison at pobox dot com.