Introduction
============

cl-charms provides CFFI bindings to libcurses, for most Common Lisp
implementations.

It is intended to succeed cl-ncurses, which used the less portable
UFFI instead of CFFI for foreign bindings.

Indeed, cl-charms includes portions of code from cl-ncurses, and is
largely a direct translation of the latter's UFFI definitions to CFFI.

Currently, it is probably feature-equivalent to cl-ncurses and
compatible with client code.  In the future, cl-charms may break
compatibility with cl-ncurses and may provide additional
functionality.

cl-charms is developed by Abhishek Reddy <abhishek@abhishek.geek.nz>,
beginning in October 2010.  It is released under an MIT-style license.
See the file COPYING for details.

Visit <http://abhishek.geek.nz/code/cl-charms> for documentation,
updates and further information on the web.

>    The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The
>    inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him
>    it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and
>    he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of
>    another man's.
          -- R.W. Emerson on originality.


Portability
===========

cl-charms has been tried with the following:

*   CLISP 2.49 on Debian GNU/Linux (testing) x86-64
*   ECL 10.7.x Git HEAD on Debian GNU/Linux (testing) x86-64
*   SBCL 1.0.42 on Debian GNU/Linux (testing) x86-64
*   CCL 1.4-r13119 on Debian GNU/Linux (testing) x86-64

cl-charms has been tried with libncurses on Debian GNU/Linux
(testing) only.  It may coincidentally be compatible with other curses
libraries and operating systems.

cl-charms ought to function on other implementations of Common Lisp
and libcurses on various distributions of GNU/Linux.  See the section
on Bugs and Contributing below for how to help test and realize this.


Installation
============

*   Extract or copy the cl-charms/ directory somewhere

*   Ensure that the file cl-charms/cl-charms.asd is in a path known to
    your installation of ASDF (see asdf:*central-registry*)

*   Evaluate something like this in your Lisp implementation:

    > (asdf:load-system :cl-charms)


Testing
=======

TODO


Usage
=====

TODO


Bugs and Contributing
=====================

Contributions in the form of bug reports, patches, requests or
suggestions are welcome.  Use the wiki for the project or send a
merge request in gitorious.org for submissions.

Major areas of work to be done:

*   Lots of missing functions inherited from cl-ncurses to be defined.
*   Untried on various GNU/Linux distros and architectures.
*   Untried with non-libncurses libraries.
*   Test cases and sample applications.
*   Only provides curses functions, lacks menus, panels or CDK.