Outcurses: Difference between revisions

Back when I was a young software witch, the first cool thing you did on a PC was switch to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_13h mode 13h] and fade the 6 bits of its 3 color channels using some x86 assembly. The effect still fills me with joy. Now it's available to your text-mode programs! Specify a number of milliseconds through which you wish to fade, and a channel-balanced, delay-adaptive fade will be executed across the palette. The default text color (colorpair -1 in ncurses semantics) is *not* faded.

Not ncurses-related, but it's UI, so I stuck it here. Fed a <tt>uintmax_t</tt> (large enough to represent any unsigned integer type), a buffer, and a base (almost always 1000 or 1024), <tt>enmetric</tt> renders the number into the buffer such that the characteristic (material to the left of the decimal point) is less than the base. For numbers greater than the base, this means some metric suffix will be employed, and that the displayed number will have a mantissa (e.g. 1234 with a base of 1000 becomes 1.234K). Numbers through 2^89 are properly handled, using the suffixes Y, Z, E, P, T, G, M, and K. Use of base 1024 is necessary to properly employ the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte metric units of digital information]. For instance, a "10 terabyte" hard drive typically has 10* 10¹² == 10,000,000,000,000 (ten trillion) bytes aka 10TB, but 10 * 2⁴⁰ == 10 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 is 10,995,116,277,760 bytes aka 10 tibibytes aka 10TiB. A kilobyte is 97.7% of a kibibyte, but a terabyte is only 91% of a tibibyte.