I have written a program that uses ncurses for the UI and the function mvwgetnstr to read in a string from a window. I want to allow users to make edits to the text they enter, so if they enter foo they can later go back and append bar. I cannot figure out how to do this with the curses API, the getnstr function only takes in a char buffer and length variable. Any ideas? I started making my own string input function, but it's difficult to keep everything constrained within the window.
It depends on what you want. There are many possible ways to organize a program:
getnstr reads the buffer from the standard screen (a window)wgetnstr function accepts a buffer from a given window. Using a separate window (or subwindow) reduces the problem of updates for the edited buffer interfering with other things on the screen.getnstr editing is crude. If you use the form library (which in turn uses ncurses), that allows you to do more than just append/remove characters from the end of the input buffer.The ncurses-examples might be helpful for reading and seeing how to build up a suitable input function.