You can send "escape sequences" to stdout - IIRC you can read the cursor position from stdin, after sending the "get position" escape sequence. Unfortunately, I don't know what that is! :( Possibly that "c" that the comment below refers to?
global _start
section .data
; msg db 27, '[37;40m Hello, World!',10,0
; c - garbage back d - row?, r - home, f - row;col
msg db 27,'[2j' ; cls?
db 27, '[18;48f' ; row 18, column 48
db 27, '[37;44m' ; white foreground, blue background
db ' Hello, World! ',10
db 27, '[37;40m' ; "normal" white on black
db 27, '[25;0f' ; row 25
msg_len equ $ - msg
section .text
_start
mov eax, 4 ;system call number (sys_write)
mov ebx, 1 ;file descriptor (stdout)
mov ecx, msg ;message to write
mov edx, msg_len
int 0x80 ;call kernel
exit:
mov eax,1 ;system call number (sys_exit)
int 0x80
;-------------------------------------------
... or so. I don't recall where I found the info for the values... pretty much the same as ANSI.SYS, I think, if you're familiar with that. Part of "VT-100" specs, maybe(?) I *think* this is the way "ncurses" does it - calling "ncurses" would be a way, but I take it you don't want to do that.
Another way to do it is to open /dev/vcsa0 for RW... There's a few bytes of "header" in the file, then char/attribute/char/attribute... just like writing direct to the screen in DOS. You move the cursor by sys_seeking around in the file. Kinda weird. There may be issues with "permissions" to that file. Konstantin's "window" example in the asmutils -
http://www.linuxassembly.org - does it this way. Whether you can open this file and determine the cursor position by finding the file-pointer (seek to "current position")??? - I doubt that would work - I think the file pointer would be at zero when you first open the file.
So sending escape sequences might be your best bet. I'll see if I can figure out what the command is...
Best,
Frank
