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?

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

       • 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.

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

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

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

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

       • Wait for an event of type CACA_EVENT_KEY_PRESS.

       • 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