ncurses: Classic terminal output library#

Description#

Ncurses (new curses, pronounced “enn-curses”) started as a freely distributable “clone” of System V Release 4.0 (SVr4) curses. It has outgrown the “clone” description, and now contains many features which are not in SVr4 curses. Curses 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).

The name “ncurses” was first used as the name of the curses library in Pavel Curtis’s pcurses, dated 1982. It was apparently developed on a BSD 4.4 system, at Cornell. Parts of pcurses are readily identifiable in ncurses, including the basics for the terminfo compiler (named compile in that package):

the Caps, used to define the terminfo capabilities
awk scripts MKcaptab.awk, MKnames.awk
the library modules used for the terminfo compiler.

Besides ncurses, parts of pcurses still survive in 2010, in recognizable form in Solaris.

Website: http://invisible-island.net/ncurses

License#

MIT-style

Upstream Contact#

bug-ncurses@gnu.org

Special Update/Build Instructions#

None

Type#

standard

Dependencies#

Version Information#

package-version.txt:

6.3