GNT: The GLib Ncurses Toolkit

GNT is an ncurses toolkit for creating text-mode graphical user interfaces in a fast and easy way. It is based on GLib and ncurses.

It was born out of the console-based UI, Finch, for the libpurple project, but has now been split into its own independent repository.

Building GNT

To build, you will need Meson, GLib, ncurses, libxml2, and Python 3. Exact versions can be determined from the meson.build in the top-level directory.

On Debian-based systems, install meson ninja-build gobject-introspection libgirepository1.0-dev gtk-doc-tools libglib2.0-dev libxml2-dev libncurses-dev libpython3-dev.

On Fedora-based systems, install meson ninja-build gobject-introspection gtk-doc glib2-devel libxml2-devel ncurses-devel python3-devel.

You can then run Meson and Ninja as usual (passing any -D options if necessary):

$ meson build
$ ninja -C build
$ ninja -C build install

Notes About Versioning

This code was originally contained in the Pidgin/Finch/libpurple repository. Versions were set by the top-level configure.ac in that repository. The GNT version was independent of Pidgin and Finch and the tag. This repository contains the original tags and so you may see multiple tags pointing to the same commit. The GNT version as it was released is noted in the second column of the table below.

A second configure.ac was included in the libgnt subdirectory that was extracted to produce this repository. Unfortunately, we were not consistent with updating the version in that copy. It was deemed too much work for little gain to go back through the history to correct this error when producing this split repository. As such, the third column of the table below contains the version as recorded in configure.ac at the time of a tag.

Beginning with version 2.14.0, the code has been moved to a separate repository and so the tag and the version will remain in sync.