Editing Curses (programming library) (section)

==Applications==
{{Main|Text-based user interface}}
Curses is designed to facilitate GUI-like functionality on a text-only device, such as a PC running in console mode, a hardware ANSI terminal, a [[Telnet]] or [[Secure Shell|SSH]] client, or similar. Curses-based software is software whose [[user interface]] is implemented through the curses library, or a compatible library (such as [[ncurses]]).

Curses-based programs often have a user interface that resembles a traditional graphical user interface, including '[[Widget (computing)|widgets]]' such as text boxes and scrollable lists, rather than the [[command line interface]] (CLI) most commonly found on text-only devices. This can make them more user-friendly than a CLI-based program, while still being able to run on text-only devices. Curses-based software can also have a lighter resource footprint and operate on a wider range of systems (both in terms of hardware and software) than their GUI-based counterparts. This includes old pre-1990 machines along with modern embedded systems using text-only displays.

Curses is most commonly associated with [[Unix-like]] operating systems, although implementations for [[Microsoft Windows]] also exist.