wvline3x

Overview

wborder and border draw a box at the edges of the specified window or stdscr, respectively. Each chtype argument corresponds to a geometric component of the border as follows:

If any chtype argument is 0, then curses uses forms-drawing characters (see addch(3X)) in the following correspondence:

box(win, verch, horch) is shorthand for “wborder( win, verch, verch, horch, horch, 0, 0, 0, 0)”.

whline draws a horizontal line of ch from left to right, and wvline a vertical one from top to bottom, stopping once n characters have been drawn or upon reaching the boundary of win. These functions do not update the cursor position (beyond any motion directed by their “mv” variants). ncurses(3X) describes the variants of these functions.

Return value

These functions return OK on success and ERR on failure.

In ncurses,

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these functions fail if the screen is not initialized; and

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functions taking a WINDOW pointer argument fail if win is a null pointer.

Functions prefixed with “mv” first perform cursor movement and fail if the position (y, x) is outside the window boundaries.

Notes

Unusually, there is no wbox function; box behaves as one would expect wbox to, accepting a WINDOW pointer argument.

border, box, hline, mvhline, mvwhline, vline, mvvline, and mvwvline may be implemented as macros.

Borders drawn by these functions are interior borders.

Portability

These functions are described in X/Open Curses Issue 4. It specifies no error conditions for them.

SVr4 documentation says that these functions return OK “or a non-negative integer if immedok() is set”, referring to the return value from wrefresh, which in SVr4 returns a count of characters written to the window if its immedok property is set; in ncurses, it does not.

BSD curses drew boxes with horch in every character cell of the top and bottom lines of the window, whereas SVr3.1 and later curses, because its box wrapped wborder, used the default corner characters.