by X. Li

Ncurses C Tutorial
Lib Ncurses
Ncurses Example

Get notifications on updates for this project. Get the SourceForge newsletter. Get newsletters and notices that include site news, special offers and exclusive discounts about IT products & services. NCurses Development Kit for C NDK provides a set of widgets for text user interface like menubars, popup menus, various dialog boxes, and controls (push buttons, check buttons etc.). Using this library you can easy create a powefull console program with compicated interface. Ncurses for visual c If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register or Login before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below. The license has been changed to the MIT-style license used by NCURSES. Note that the programs are also re-licensed under this. Revision 1.8: 2005-06-17: Revised by: ppadala: Lots of updates. Added references and perl examples. Changes to examples. Many grammatical and stylistic changes to the content. Changes to NCURSES history.

If you have some beginning experience in Unix programming, you may have felt the need of some text user interface operations, such as moving the cursor on the screen, editing user input, using colors, .. Such terminal IO related operations are not portable and not defined in C language. You need to either use the low-level termcap library or the curses library. Using curses/ncurses library is much easier and more portable.

Contents

Using the library: Installations, header inclusions and link options.
Before and after using ncurses function: Thing you need to do before calling curses functions
Creating windows: Creating windows
Moving the cursor: Move the cursor around the window
Input: Read user input from keyboard
Output: Write text to the window
Using colors and other text attributes: Text colors, highlighting, blinking, ..
Using curses in Xterm: How to cope window resizing by user
An example of complete programs: A typing speed test program by me

Using ncurses library

To compile your C/C++ programs using ncurses/curses library you need to include the curses header file <curses.h>. For ncurses, you may include either <curses.h> or <ncurses.h>. In some systems, you must include <ncurses.h>.

#include <curses.h>

To link the programs you need to use the -lcurses or -lncurses option, like

gcc -lncurses prog.c

This way the program is dynamically linked to the ncurses library. To run it in another computer, the system must have the ncurses library installed. If you want to avoid the trouble, you may have it statically linked. To do that, find the file libncurses.a Ncurses

in /usr/lib and do

gcc prog.c libncurses.a

Most Unix systems have curses or ncurses installed as a default option. To find out if it's installed, you can try man ncurses man curses or go to /usr/lib and /usr/include to list the files.

If you're installing Linux or FreeBSD on your own machine, be sure to install the ncurses-development package in order to do ncurses programming.

Initialization

The very first thing to do: Before you use any other curses routines, the initscr() routine must be called first.

initscr();

If your program is going to write to several terminals, you should call newterm instead, which is another story.

One-character-a-time. To disable the buffering of typed characters by the TTY driver and get a character-at-a-time input, you need to call

cbreak();

No echo. To suppress the automatic echoing of typed characters, you need to call

noecho();

Special keys. In order to capture special keystrokes like Backspace, Delete and the four arrow keys by getch(), you need to call

keypad(stdscr, TRUE);

Before exiting. Before the program is terminated, endwin() must be called to restore the terminal settings.

Windows

A window is a 2-dimensional array of characters representing all or part of a CRT screen. Character input and output should pertain to a specific window.

The default window. A default window called stdscr, which is the size of the terminal screen, is supplied. To use the stdscr window, you don't need to do any initializations. You can also divide the screen to several parts and create a window to represent each part.

Create a new window. The data structure of window is WINDOW, defined in ncurses.h. To declare and create a new window, do

WINDOW * win = newwin(nlines, ncols, y0, x0);

All the 4 parameters are ints. Here nline is the height of the window -- number of lines, ncols is the width -- number of columns of the window. y0 and x0 are the coordinates of the upper left corner of win on the screen -- line y0 and columns x0. You should make sure that the area of the new window is inside the screen.

Height and width of the window. The size of the whole screen can be determined by the two global variables COLUMNS and LINES. y0 and x0 should satisfy Universal key generator free download.

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In X window system, the actual xterm size might be changed leaving these two variables obslete. In this case you should use the macro void getmaxyx(WINDOW *, int y, int x) to get the size of the screen.

No overlapping. Windows cannot overlap with each other. Therefore you have two options: only use stdscr and no other windows, or create several non-overlapping windows but do not use stdscr.

Refresh. If you make some change to a window, such as printing something or moving the cursor, the effect is not shown on the screen until you call the wrefresh() function

Clear window. To erase everything written in the window win, call wrefresh(win). refresh() is equivalent to wrefresh(stdscr).

Delete window. If a window win is no longer needed, and you're going to create new windows to overlap it, you should call delwin(win) to delete the window (release the memory it is using).

Moving the cursor

The position of the cursor on the screen is important because it is default beginning place for most output functions. The cursor also shows the user where the input is expected.

To move the cursor to a new position on a window, use the function int wmove(WINDOW *win, int y, int x)

wmove(win, y, x);

where (x, y) are the coordinates of the new position in the window. If the window has nlines lines and ncolumns columns, then

Refresh. The actual cursor motion is not shown on the screen untill you do a wrefresh(win).

move(y, x) is equivalent to the wmove(stdscr, y, x).

Input

Ncurses C Tutorial

To read a character from stdscr, use the function int getch(void). No echoing. If you have called noecho(), the character

Dev C%2b%2b Ncurses