Editing Curses (programming library) (section)

== Overview ==
Using curses, programmers are able to write text-based applications without writing directly for any specific terminal type. The curses library on the executing system sends the correct control characters based on the terminal type. It provides an abstraction of one or more windows that maps onto the terminal screen. Each window is represented by a character matrix. The programmer sets up the desired appearance of each window, then tells the curses package to update the screen. The library determines a minimal set of changes that are needed to update the display and then executes these using the terminal's specific capabilities and control sequences.

In short, this means that the programmer creates a character matrix of how the screen should look and lets curses handle the work.

The curses [[Application programming interface|API]] is described in several places.<ref>John Strang, ''Programming with curses'', O'Reilly, {{ISBN|0-937175-02-1}}</ref> Most implementations of curses use a database that can describe the capabilities of thousands of different terminals. There are a few implementations, such as PDCurses, which use specialized device drivers rather than a terminal database. Most implementations use [[terminfo]]; some use [[termcap]]. Curses has the advantage of back-portability to character-cell terminals and simplicity. For an application that does not require bit-mapped graphics or multiple fonts, an interface implementation using curses will usually be much simpler and faster than one using an [[X Window System|X]] toolkit.