Bug#950492: ITP: notcurses -- Character-mode graphics and TUI library

[Nick Black <dankamongmen@gmail.com>]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Nick Black <dankamongmen@gmail.com>

* Package name    : notcurses
  Version         : 1.1.4
  Upstream Author : Nick Black <nickblack@linux.com>
* URL             : https://nick-black.com/dankwiki/index.php/notcurses
* License         : Apache-2.0
  Programming Lang: C, C++, Python
  Description     : Character-mode graphics and TUI library

 notcurses facilitates the creation of modern TUI programs,
 making full use of Unicode and 24-bit direct color. It presents
 an API similar to that of Curses, and rides atop libtinfo.

Work on notcurses began in November of 2019, and it has had Debian-compatible
infrastructure (debhelper compat level 12) from the beginning. As of February
2020, it is rapidly stabilizing, and being used in several tools. I've
rewritten my "growlight" disk management tool using notcurses instead of
ncurses, cutting out several thousand lines of UI code along the way. Nestopia
is about to merge notcurses support (coming out of maintenance mode to do so).
I'm working on a console SDR visualization tool that will make working with
remote SDRs much more pleasant, and expect to release it soon.

Sid/unstable debs are available (and have been available for weeks) in my repo
at https://www.dsscaw.com/apt (this repo is available in Wouter Verhelst's
extrepo tool). The Debian packaging that I currently have can be seen here:
https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/tree/master/debian

Notcurses can be regarded as a successor to ncurses. It provides much of the
functionality of that package, with major improvements IMHO regarding Unicode,
multithreading, and color support. 24-bit RGB with two bits of transparency is
the fundamental color space, and input/output are entirely based off UTF8 and
Unicode's Extended Grapheme Clusters. I've written many thousand lines of
ncurses code in my life, and expect to write no more--notcurses will entirely
supplant it in my projects. ncurses is a venerable, robust library, with a
fantastic maintainer in Thomas E. Dickey, but it's fundamentally bound to
X/OSI. It's time to move past 90s-era TUI APIs.

As for maintaining the package, I've written 90%+ of the code in notcurses, and
intend to maintain it for the long haul. I'm actively committed to maintaining
the Debian/Ubuntu packaging, and indeed hope to use it as a springboard towards
Debian Developer status.

notcurses has been included in Arch's AUR since its 0.4.0 release in November
2019.