Changes Coming in Goncurses 0.3

*Updated  for more content*

I've been doing some more work in the month since I tagged 0.2 that, unfortunately, will introduce more breakage. I really hate to continue changing the API in backwards incompatible ways but I feel these changes are pretty necessary.

Before I get into that, though, let me introduce the most exciting change to Goncurses. So, without further adieu!

Windows Support!

 Yes, you read correctly. PDCurses support! Windows users may rejoice! ;)

I had a lot of reservations about adding PDCurses support since there seemed to be some surprisingly major incompatibilities with ncurses. I had attempted to add support almost a year ago but quickly became frustrated and decided to discard my efforts to focus on ncurses support alone. However, due to a personal need, I decided to revisit integrating PDCurses and finally met with success.

By default Goncurses will always use ncurses on Linux and MacOS X but I imagine you could also use PDCurses on those platforms as well with minimal changes. Built-in support for doing so will likely never be introduced into the library.

A New Demo/Game

I also have added a new, fun example program which features a much more complete working example of using Goncurses. It is a side-scrolling shoot-em-up called Starfield where you blast asteroids. Rather than use Go's concurrency model to handle input and drawing separately I instead used Go's time library to simulate "heartbeats" using Tickers for different timings. Updating of the background, user input (ship position) and active sprites all happen at different intervals which I can finely control. In order to achieve this I used a select statement to poll whether a 'tick' or 'heartbeat' has happened and, if not, handle any input. It was pretty fun to whip together but don't expect anything magical!

I am also in the progress of writing a feature demo but it's in a poor state right now and I don't recommend using it, yet.

Breaking Changes

• Changed NapMilliseconds to simply Nap
• Changed NL to NewLines for clarity
• Changed Getyx to CursorYX to make it clear exactly what you were getting; see below for the new YX function
• Changed Maxyx to MaxYX to match YX and CursorYX
•  DelChar was split into DelChar and MoveDelChar to make the interface more idiomatic Go and inline with the rest of the library.
• (Update) Window creation functions like Init, NewWindow, Sub and Duplicate now return pointers. Any functions which take pointers like Sub does you no longer need to take the address of the Window you are passing which may break some code. Thankfully it's a simple, if not annoying, fix.
• (Update) GetMouse now returns a MouseEvent to make it more idiomatic and sane.
• (Update) Mouse has been renamed to MouseOk
• (Update) Form and Menu functions now take the Char type as parameters to match the rest of the library.

Other Changes

• NewPad now returns a pointer and all pad related methods use a pointer receiver. This should not break/change existing code unless you needed to address a pad for some reason.
• Several Window methods had their godoc strings improved.
• The Parent Window method was fixed to work properly. Previously it always returned a Window object whether it was valid or not. Now it correctly returns nil if the window has no parent.
• (Update) Made fixes to almost all examples including: a vastly improved Window example, and the Mouse example much improved and should now work properly on all platforms.

Pending Changes

• Finish the feature demo
• (Update) Change functions/methods that return a Window to return pointers. This will help with several functions which expect to receive a Window pointer and other implementation difficulties when writing Goncurses apps. In most cases old code should not need to be updated but there will be some exceptions to that rule.