lp/c/sdl

hello_sdl

While reading Things Unlearned by Jamie Brandon recently, I happened upon this paragraph:

I definitely feel I've gotten better at this. When I wanted to write a text editor last year I spent a few days learning the absolute basics of graphics programming and text rendering, used mostly mainstream tools like sdl and freetype, and then just sat down and shoveled through a long todo list. In the end it only took 100 hours or so, much less time than I spent thrashing on that note-taking app a decade ago. And now I get to use my text editor all the time.

And then I proceeded to render some text using SDL + FreeType. It took 2 or 3 hours, never having used SDL or FreeType. That includes debugging various string-related segfaults in C. (Don't write to statically allocated char *msg = "..."; and don't use strcmp with NULL pointers.)

It was fun! And hence, this little thing. You can even type something yourself.

This is how it looks after those initial few hours:

And for everything else, see hello_sdl.c. To run it compile it by running make make and then run ./hello_sdl. Do note that you'll need a TTF font from somewhere and then run it like this:

./hello_sdl /usr/share/fonts/TTF/DejaVuSerif.ttf

By default it wants ./FantasqueSansMono-Regular.ttf, which you can get from the ttf-fantasque-sans-mono package on ArchLinux.