bkgd(3NCURSES) bkgd(3NCURSES)
NAME
bkgdset, wbkgdset, bkgd, wbkgd, getbkgd - curses window background ma-
nipulation routines
SYNOPSIS
#include <curses.h>
void bkgdset(chtype ch);
void wbkgdset(WINDOW *win, chtype ch);
int bkgd(chtype ch);
int wbkgd(WINDOW *win, chtype ch);
chtype getbkgd(WINDOW *win);
DESCRIPTION
bkgdset
The bkgdset and wbkgdset routines manipulate the background of the
named window. The window background is a chtype consisting of any com-
bination of attributes (i.e., rendition) and a character. The attri-
bute part of the background is combined (OR'ed) with all non-blank
characters that are written into the window with waddch. Both the
character and attribute parts of the background are combined with the
blank characters. The background becomes a property of the character
and moves with the character through any scrolling and insert/delete
line/character operations.
To the extent possible on a particular terminal, the attribute part of
the background is displayed as the graphic rendition of the character
put on the screen.
bkgd
The bkgd and wbkgd functions set the background property of the current
or specified window and then apply this setting to every character po-
sition in that window. According to X/Open Curses, it should do this:
• The rendition of every character on the screen is changed to the
new background rendition.
• Wherever the former background character appears, it is changed to
the new background character.
Neither X/Open Curses nor the SVr4 manual pages give details about the
way the rendition of characters on the screen is updated when bkgd or
wbkgd is used to change the background character.
This implementation, like SVr4 curses, does not store the background
and window attribute contributions to each cell separately. It updates
the rendition by comparing the character, non-color attributes and col-
ors contained in the background. For each cell in the window, whether
or not it is blank:
• The library first compares the character, and if it matches the
current character part of the background, it replaces that with the
new background character.
• The library then checks if the cell uses color, i.e., its color
pair value is nonzero. If not, it simply replaces the attributes
and color pair in the cell with those from the new background char-
acter.
• If the cell uses color, and that matches the color in the current
background, the library removes attributes which may have come from
the current background and adds attributes from the new background.
It finishes by setting the cell to use the color from the new back-
ground.
• If the cell uses color, and that does not match the color in the
current background, the library updates only the non-color at-
tributes, first removing those which may have come from the current
background, and then adding attributes from the new background.
If the background's character value is zero, a space is assumed.
If the terminal does not support color, or if color has not been
started with start_color, the new background character's color attri-
bute will be ignored.
getbkgd
The getbkgd function returns the given window's current background
character/attribute pair.
RETURN VALUE
These functions are described in the XSI Curses standard, Issue 4. It
specifies that bkgd and wbkgd return ERR on failure, but gives no fail-
ure conditions.
The routines bkgd and wbkgd return the integer OK, unless the library
has not been initialized.
In contrast, the SVr4.0 manual says bkgd and wbkgd may return OK "or a
non-negative integer if immedok is set", which refers to the return
value from wrefresh (used to implement the immediate repainting). The
SVr4 curses wrefresh returns the number of characters written to the
screen during the refresh. This implementation does not do that.
NOTES
Note that bkgdset and bkgd may be macros.
X/Open Curses mentions that the character part of the background must
be a single-byte value. This implementation, like SVr4, checks to en-
sure that, and will reuse the old background character if the check
fails.
PORTABILITY
These functions are described in the XSI Curses standard, Issue 4
(X/Open Curses).
SEE ALSO
ncurses(3NCURSES), addch(3NCURSES), attr(3NCURSES), outopts(3NCURSES)
bkgd(3NCURSES)
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