Installing ncurses for ruby on Windows

Question

I am trying to install ncurses for ruby on windows. I have not installed ncurses before on my machine. I thought that having the "ruby devkit", it had asked for would be enough, but now I am being asked to specify options... I don't know which options to pick, or if I need to do/install other things for the gem to get installed:

C:\Ruby193\Devkit>gem install ncurses -- --ruby=C:/Ruby193/bin/ruby --without-make-prog --without-opt-dir
Temporarily enhancing PATH to include DevKit...
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing ncurses:
        ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

        C:/Ruby193/bin/ruby.exe extconf.rb --ruby=C:/Ruby193/bin/ruby --without-make-prog --without-opt-dir
C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/1.9.1/shellwords.rb:35:in `shellsplit': undefined method `scan' for false:FalseClass (NoMethodError)
        from C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/1.9.1/mkmf.rb:2216:in `<top (required)>'
        from C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `require'
        from C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `require'
        from extconf.rb:22:in `<main>'


Gem files will remain installed in C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/ncurses-0.9.1 for inspection.
Results logged to C:/Ruby193/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/ncurses-0.9.1/./gem_make.out

WHAT A PAIN, I just want to get this gem installed so I can run this:

require 'curses'
cols = Curses.stdscr.maxx
msg = "random_string"
str = msg.center(msg.length + cols - msg.length - 5 - 3)
puts "<!-- #{str}-->"

Answer 1

Updated version:

1. Get ncurses (MinGW Port): http://invisible-island.net/ncurses/
2. Put it in C:\ncurses
3. gem install curses --platform=ruby -- --with-ncurses-dir="C:\ncurses"
4. Copy the contents of C:\ncurses\bin to somewhere in your path

C:\ncurses can be any directory

Answer 2

I've managed to do it for ruby 2.2, which doesn't come with curses by default, but it took me a while:

• Download PDCurses from SourceForge;
• Unzip it;
• Copy it's contents to a folder where ruby can see it. I'm not sure which one I used, I think I copied it to multiple ones until it worked. ruby -e 'puts $:' might help;
• Install curses, gem instal curses. If the previous step was wrong, this will fail;
• Done :D

This method didn't work for other gems, like ffi-ncurses. Tip: most of curses functionality comes from the Window class, which comes with curses by default.

Answer 3

Update: It seems like SourceForge no longer hosts NCurses binaries for Windows. This answer is effectively obsolete now. Sorry! (As of August 2015, the GNU NCurses Page lists a "new" v6.0 release, which is newer than the 0.9.1 version in my answer.)

I finally got this to work (years after I needed it ...) without Cygwin, PDCurses, or manually building the NCurses source. The instructions are available on my blog. For reference:

• Download the latest NCurses binaries (0.9.1) from SourceForge.
• Unzip the files somewhere on your machine.
• Find out where Ruby searches for libraries by running ruby -e 'puts $:'
• Copy and paste ncurses.so and lib\ncurses.rb from the NCurses directory into the directory you picked. Place them both in the root directory.
• Run your NCurses-enabled app.

It works. Without PDCurses!

Answer 4

I've successfully downloaded ncurses 0.9.1 binaries from sourceforge, so the library is still available.

I then tried with both native Ruby and IronRuby 1.1.3

1. placing the two files (ncurses.so ncurses.rb) in

   C:\Ruby\Ruby193\lib\ruby\1.9.1

   gives an error with native Ruby

   The specified module could not be found. - C:/Ruby/Ruby193/lib/ruby/1.9.1/ncurses.so (LoadError)

2. Placing them here (for IronRuby) C:\Program Files (x86)\IronRuby 1.1\Lib\ruby\1.9.1

   gives

   The module was expected to contain an assembly manifest. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131018)

Answer 5

When gem installed needs for curses lib; so at first you need to install NCurses with your msys2

https://sourceforge.net/p/mingw-w64/wiki2/NCurses/

Download NCurses (v5.9 at the time of writing): http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/ncurses/ in the source directory

Then untar and in the MSYS shell:

./configure --host=x86_64-w64-mingw32 --enable-term-driver --enable-sp-funcs --prefix=/some/prefix

make

make check

make install

then as mentioned in the link : https://github.com/ruby/curses/issues/13

use --platform=ruby ,--with-curses-include ,--with-curses-lib flags with gem install

Answer 6

The ruby ncurses gem requires that ncurses in installed on the machine. As far as I know ncurses has not been ported to windows. So I don't think you are going to get this to work.

There may be other ways to find out how wide the screen is on windows but I can't help you with that.