cview/FORK.md

4.7 KiB

This document explains why tview was forked to create cview. It also explains any differences between the projects and tracks which tview pull requests have been merged into cview.

Why fork?

rivo, the creator and sole maintainer of tview, explains his reviewing and merging process in a GitHub comment.

He states that he does not have the necessary time or interest to review, discuss and merge pull requests:

this project is quite low in priority. It doesn't generate any income for me and, unfortunately, reviewing issues and PRs is also not much "fun".

But some other people submitted large PRs which will cost me many hours to review. (I had to chuckle a bit when I saw this comment.)

Lastly, I'm the one who ends up maintaining this code. I have to be 100% behind it, understand it 100%, and be able to make changes to it later if necessary.

cview aims to solve these issues by increasing the number of project maintainers and allowing code changes which may be outside of tview's scope.

Differences

Primitive methods do not return the primitive they belong to

When chaining multiple method calls on a primitive together, application developers might accidentally end the chain with a different return type than the first method call. This could result in unexpected return types. For example, ending a chain with SetTitle would result in a Box rather than the original primitive.

cview is thread-safe

tview is not thread-safe.

Application.QueueUpdate and Application.QueueUpdateDraw do not block

tview blocks until the queued function returns.

Primitive has two additional fields, SetVisible and GetVisible

Widgets embedding Box require the addition of the following at the beginning of their Draw routine to handle visibility changes.

func (w *Widget) Draw(screen tcell.Screen) {
	if !w.GetVisible() {
		return
	}

	// ...
}

Setting a primitive's background color to tcell.ColorDefault does not result in transparency

Call Box.SetBackgroundTransparent to enable background transparency.

Double clicks are not handled by default

All clicks are handled as single clicks until an interval is set with Application.SetDoubleClickInterval.

Tables are sorted when a fixed row is clicked by default

Call Table.SetSortClicked to disable this behavior.

Lists and Forms do not wrap around by default

Call SetWrapAround to wrap around when navigating.

Tables do not wrap around when selecting a cell

Attempting to move outside of the range of the table results in the selection remaining unchanged.

TextViews store their text as []byte instead of string

This greatly improves buffer efficiency. TextView.Write is 90% faster and TextView.Draw is 50% faster.

Pages has been renamed as Panels

This is for consistency with TabbedPanels, which is built on top of Panels.

Application.ForceDraw has been removed

Because cview is thread-safe, application draws must be queued. Call Application.QueueUpdateDraw to queue an update that requires the application to be drawn when completed.

Merged pull requests

The following tview pull requests have been merged into cview: