Ncurses
ncurses-based menuconfig
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| Developer(s) | GNU Project |
|---|---|
| Initial release | 1993 |
| Stable release |
6.0 / 8 August 2015
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| Repository | ftp |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | POSIX |
| Type | Widget toolkit |
| License | X11 License |
| Website | www |
ncurses (new curses) is a programming library providing an application programming interface (API) that allows the programmer to write text-based user interfaces in a terminal-independent manner. It is a toolkit for developing "GUI-like" application software that runs under a terminal emulator. It also optimizes screen changes, in order to reduce the latency experienced when using remote shells.
As the new version, ncurses is a free-software emulation of the System V Release 4.0 (SVr4) curses, which was itself an enhancement over the discontinued 4.4 BSD curses. The XSI Curses standard issued by X/Open is explicitly and closely modeled on System V.
The first curses library was developed at the University of California at Berkeley, for a BSD operating system, around 1980 to support a screen-oriented game. It originally used the termcap library, which was used in other programs, such as the vi editor.
The success of the BSD curses library prompted Bell Labs to release an enhanced curses library in their System V Release 2 Unix systems. This library was more powerful and instead of using termcap, it used terminfo. However, due to AT&T policy regarding source-code distribution, this improved curses library did not have much acceptance in the BSD community.
Around 1982, Pavel Curtis started work on a freeware clone of the Bell Labs curses, named pcurses, which was maintained by various people through 1986.
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