libcaca-tutorial(3caca) 					      libcaca						   libcaca-tutorial(3caca)

NAME

       libcaca-tutorial - A libcaca tutorial First, a very simple working program, to check for basic libcaca functionalities.

       #include <caca.h>

       int main(void)
       {
	   caca_canvas_t *cv; caca_display_t *dp; caca_event_t ev;

	   dp = caca_create_display(NULL);
	   if(!dp) return 1;
	   cv = caca_get_canvas(dp);

	   caca_set_display_title(dp, 'Hello!');
	   caca_set_color_ansi(cv, CACA_BLACK, CACA_WHITE);
	   caca_put_str(cv, 0, 0, 'This is a message');
	   caca_refresh_display(dp);
	   caca_get_event(dp, CACA_EVENT_KEY_PRESS, &ev, -1);
	   caca_free_display(dp);

	   return 0;
       }

       What does it do?

       o Create a display. Physically, the display is either a window or a context in a terminal (ncurses, slang) or even the whole screen (VGA).

       o Get the display's associated canvas. A canvas is the surface where everything happens: writing characters, sprites, strings, images... It
	 is unavoidable. Here the size of the canvas is set by the display.

       o Set the display's window name (only available in windowed displays, does nothing otherwise).

       o Set the current canvas colours to black background and white foreground.

       o Write the string 'This is a message' onto the canvas, using the current colour pair.

       o Refresh the display, causing the text to be effectively displayed.

       o Wait for an event of type CACA_EVENT_KEY_PRESS.

       o Free the display (release memory). Since it was created together with the display, the canvas will be automatically freed as well.

       You can then compile this code on an UNIX-like system using the following commans (requiring pkg-config and gcc):

       gcc `pkg-config --libs --cflags caca` example.c -o example

Version 0.99.beta18						  Fri Apr 6 2012					   libcaca-tutorial(3caca)