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Curses

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.

Benefits of using curses

• Curses reads terminal specifics from either TERMINFO or TERMCAP - depending on the Unix flavour. The programmer does not need to worry about the specifics of terminals. This would be a lot of work. Curses deals with the details. How does curses know about, the terminal? The user has to set and export the TERM environment variable and set it to the correct terminal name e.g. vt320 or xterm.
• Curses is portable
• Easy to learn and understand
• Sufficient information an HOWTO's available e.g this on

Recommendations: Curses

• I bought Programminh 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.

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Franz Brandel

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