Curses

Libraries for character oriented user interfaces with standardised UNIX functions that provide rudimentary screen handling and updating of text-based windowing. It is a very basic API and is commonly used on UNIX like systems as a sort of lowest common denominator for a text user interface. Curses libraries are available for various operating systems. Although most commonly used with a text mode C programs the API can also be used from other programming languages and is quite often used with scripting languages such as REXX.

The name "curses" is a pun on "cursor optimization" and the software concept and name it traces its roots to terminal libraries from the early 70s and appears to pre-date UNIX even.

Implementations

Note that PDCurses is just one of many curses libraries out there. nCurses, P Curses and PC Curses exist or have been ported to OS/2 at some point in time.

BSD curses - included with emx
pcurses
PD Curses
NCurses - requires GNU terminfo

REXX

Rexx/Curses

Publications

John Strang: Programming with curses - O’Reilly 1986, ISBN 0-937175-02-1
Berny Goodheart: UNIX Curses Explained - Prentice-Hall 1991, ISBN 0-13-931957-3

Links

X/Open-Standard