Programming with curses: UNIX C Library for Screen Manipulation

by John Strang

curses is a UNIX library of functions for controlling a terminal's display screen from a C program. It can be used to provide a screen driver for a program (such as a visual editor) or to improve a program's user interface.

This handbook will help you make use of the curses library in your C programs. We have presented ample material on curses and its implementation in UNIX so that you understand the whole, as well as its parts.

This handbook covers Ken Arnold's original Berkeley implementation of curses, not the System V version.

Topics covered
Windows, screens, and images.
Multiple windows.
The WINDOW structure.

Genres: Programming, Computers

74 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

John^^Strang

Reviews

[Koen Crolla]

curses is a hideous library in terms of function and variable naming, representing a genuine low point in the already not-stellar track record of C codebases of the late '70s/early '80s. It's also, however, a small and conceptually straightforward one; there's little a book can say about it that the man pages don't, and little that Programming with curses does. You may prefer to have an off-line reference, but there are cheaper options.
The main value of this book, then, is that its title is funny if you pretend not to know what curses is, and that's exactly why I bought it.

[Michael Browne]

Has bailed me out when digging into old curses code that is still faster than Java