Next Previous Contents

1. Introduction

Newt has a definite design philosophy behind it, and knowing that design makes it significantly easier to craft robust newt applications. This tutorial documents newt 0.30 --- older versions of newt had annoying inconsistencies in it (which writing this tutorial pointed out), which were removed while this tutorial was written. The latest version of newt is always available from Red Hat.

1.1 Background

Newt was originally designed for use in the install code for Red Hat Linux. As this install code runs in an environment with limited resources (most importantly limited filesystem space), newt's size was immediately an issue. To help minimize its size, the following design decisions were made early in its implementation:

While newt provides a complete API, it does not handle the low-level screen drawing itself. Instead, newt is layered on top of the screen management capabilities of John E. Davis's S-Lang library.


Next Previous Contents