Miscellaneous Utilities Bookset

Bookset Overview

Writing Programs with ncurses

by Eric S. Raymond and Zeyd M. Ben-Halim

The ncurses package is a freeware implementation of curses, a subroutine library for terminal-independent screen-painting and input-event handling that presents a high level screen model to the programmer, hiding differences between terminal types and doing automatic optimization of output to change one screenfull of text into another. Curses uses terminfo, which is a database format that can describe the capabilities of thousands of different terminals.

This manual includes a library reference that describes the subroutines that are included in the ncurses package.

This documentation is available as freeware, and has been converted to HTML. It's included with this release for your convenience. Because of the conversion, this documentation doesn't conform to QNX typographical conventions.