Spliting screen into ncurses and non ncurses area

Question

I am a beginner C programmer and one of my assignments asks me to write an interpreter for the Logo Programming Language. To that end I was wondering if it was possible, when using the ncurses library, to split the screen up so that half retains basic terminal properties with regular text i/o and the other half is formatted in ncurses mode.

My wish is to create a UI such that in one half users can type in Logo style commands and on the other half, such commands are executed onto a little icon.

Answer 1

There is an application called screen which can split the terminal into multiple areas. What is does is implementing it's own terminal emulator which runs inside another terminal emulator. That's the only way to do it because the terminal itself has no concept of screen areas. So you basically have to implement a terminal emulator on top of ncurses which can be used as a "non ncurses area".

Perhaps a different approach would be easier. Does it need to run in a terminal? If not you could use the terminal for regular I/O only and create a GUI window of some sort beside it. Or not use the terminal at all, instead have some terminal widget embedded in your GUI (most GUI toolkits provide such I suppose).