Curses (programming library)

curses is a terminal control library for Unix-like systems, enabling the construction of text user interface (TUI) applications. The name is a pun on the term "cursor optimization". It is a library of functions that manage an application's display on character-cell terminals (e.g., VT100). ncurses is the approved replacement for 4.4BSD classic curses.

curses is a terminal control library for Unix-like systems, enabling the construction of text user interface (TUI) applications. The name is a pun on the term "cursor optimization". It is a library of functions that manage an application's display on character-cell terminals (e.g., VT100). ncurses is the approved replacement for 4.4BSD classic curses. ==Applications== Curses is designed to facilitate GUI-like functionality on a text-only device, such as a PC running in console mode, a hardware ANSI terminal, a Telnet or SSH client, or similar. Curses-based software is software whose user interface is implemented through the curses library, or a compatible library (such as ncurses). Curses-based programs often have a user interface that resembles a traditional graphical user interface, including 'widgets' such as text boxes and scrollable lists, rather than the command line interface (CLI) most commonly found on text-only devices. This can make them more user-friendly than a CLI-based program, while still being able to run on text-only devices. Curses-based software can also have a lighter resource footprint and operate on a wider range of systems (both in terms of hardware and software) than their GUI-based counterparts. This includes old pre-1990 machines along with modern embedded systems using text-only displays. Curses is most commonly associated with Unix-like operating systems, although implementations for Microsoft Windows also exist.

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