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 e

Answer 1

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 2

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.

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

As of February 2020 (and possibly earlier) you can install the ncurses lib with

gem install curses

It works without any problems, at least on Ruby 2.6.5

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

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