Although curses is not a graphical UI, we present it here, because it has been a very popular library for UI programming in the Unix world. It is not as popular as it used to be, though. Graphical UI's are a lot more comfortable to use.
But there are still applications, which do not run on graphical terminals or have to have a text mode as fallback. System administration software is a good example. HP Sysadmins use a program called sam to configure their system and this program still offers text mode.
The GNU project has a very good curses implementation, which is called ncurses. Every serious Linux distribution has to have one. I would recommend to use it, because it supports very well colors, etc, but there is also a curses implementation in every Unix platform, I know of. Curses is a feature Unix System V Rel. 4.
| I bought Programming with curses a few years ago in a second hand book shop for very little money compared to the value of this book. It is a quite thin handbook, but it explains everything about curses, the window concept, "terminal independence", etc very well and gives a few examples at the end. All you need. |