In my revived quest to write components of text-based adventure games in Perl, I ran across this very problem several weeks ago. I tried a number of slang/curses-based wrapper solutions, but all of them gave me some sort of problem. So I wrote a fairly useful UI bit called HexedUI. I've yet to document it or put it on CPAN, but feel free to use it if you can:
assilem.org/breegrl/trunk/dean/pui
If you have any questions about it, let me know. For the editor, I just delegated to vim. Lazy!
One major tip if you do try to do your own low-level thing in curses. Use pads to represent all of the text entry and then use a window to select/scroll. See Hexed::Map or Hexed::Term for an example of this. I also implemented a limited readline-like bit that works with curses since whipping out Term::ReadLine in the middle of curses didn't work. Slang also looked great, but had pitiful high-level documentation, let alone perl-specific.
Good luck. | [reply] |