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Concept
Ncurses
Summary
ncurses (new curses) is a programming library providing an application programming interface (API) that allows the programmer to write text-based user interfaces (TUI) 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.
ncurses is a free-software emulation of the System V Release 4.0 (SVr4) curses.
There are bindings for ncurses in a variety of programming languages, including Ada, Python, Gambas, Ruby, PHP, JavaScript, and Perl.
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.
Curses (programming library)
The first curses library was developed at the University of California at Berkeley, for a BSD operating system, around 1980 to support Rogue, a text-based adventure 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.
The pcurses library was further improved when Zeyd Ben-Halim took over the development effort in late 1991. The new library was released as ncurses in November 1993, with version 1.8.1 as the first major release. Subsequent work, through version 1.8.8 (M1995), was driven by Eric S. Raymond, who added the form and menu libraries written by Juergen Pfeifer.
Official source
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