Shell formatting language

On linux, console applications have the ability to format their 开发者_如何转开发output. They can set font color, set background color and can place signs everywehre on the console. Using that it is, for example, possible to implement a tetris game right into the console.

I´m wondering how one can do that. I think they use a output markup language or something else. Can anyone tell me where I can learn more about this?

Thanks very much!

Most console applications involving a lot of motion or color are built using the ncurses library. Some very common examples would be irssi (IRC client), mc (Midnight Commander, the console file browser), mutt (POP3/IMAP mail client)

It seems like you are already aware of the escape codes used to modify console colors. A good list of console color escape sequences (for Bash) can be found here.

You obviously need to get a hold of those every-popular Unix video games, rogue, srogue, larn, hack, and/or nethack. They have a long and venerable history.

Notably, these all use the standard curses — or more recently, ncurses — library. Here’s a screen shot.

Since they have no joystick, motion is with vi commands. They are hands-down the very best way to hone your vi motion skills ever invented: no more two-finger typing for you! You stop thinking about motion; it just becomes a part of your fingers’ muscle memory. You really have to play them to get a feel for the awesome “Zen” state you can get into playing them:

After enough practice, it feels as though your fingers themselves remember how to play the piece. You don’t even watch them. They've a job to do, and once they’ve learned it, can go about that job remarkably free of direct supervision. The key to clearing the mind of the outside world, so that the program becomes the dominant reality, is what a musician would call “finger memory”. (You might have heard athletes or dancers refer to it as muscle memory, but when we’re talking about using the computer, it really is the fingers that count.)

[...] Of course, that's not really what’s going on; it only seems to be. Your fingers don’t really remember. But a part of your brain that controls them does, even though “you” don’t realize it. What’s happened is that you've so successfully assimilated the moves needed that conscious direction is no longer required. The little lighthouse keeper behind your forehead can worry about other things, assured that your fingers will do the job you’ve trained them to do. Your eyes are on the screen, the program in your head, and your head is in the program. Your fingers become an unnoticed extension of your will. [...]

[...] There’s no question that, for certain tasks, the keyboard is clearly the optimally efficient input device. Consider the game of rogue or one of its more recent incarnations. You wouldn’t want to use anything but a keyboard there. The command set is just too rich. Trying to play the game with a mouse‐and‐menu interface instead of a keyboard one would slow you down by at least two orders of magnitude.

The rogue family of video games are also notable for showing how to write a video game for a regular terminal like a vt100 or an xterm, which I believe is what you are looking for. I’d probably use a more modern language than C these days, but all the same principles still apply. Both Perl and Python have good interfaces to these standard libraries.

It's not so much a markup language as a series of escape sequences that trigger the terminal viewer to format in a certain way.

You can send ANSI escape sequences before your output to indicate that the following output should be a certain color, weight, background. You can also send sequences that jump the cursor to specific locations to continue writing output.

If you are going to do a full blown app you should consider using some library such as ncurses which makes these manageable.