Ncurses 6.6 has been released with improved support for Windows Terminal, along with other enhancements including a better terminal mouse driver and improved error handling.
Ncurses is a free software emulator for curses, the standardized library of functions for managing text-based user interfaces in AT&T System V Unix. curses provided features such as color, pads, and function key mapping.
ncurses is fully compatible with older version of curses, and provides a library of functions that manages an application’s display on character-cell terminals. It uses terminfo format, supports pads and color and multiple highlights and forms characters and function-key mapping, and has all the other SVr4-curses enhan…
Ncurses 6.6 has been released with improved support for Windows Terminal, along with other enhancements including a better terminal mouse driver and improved error handling.
Ncurses is a free software emulator for curses, the standardized library of functions for managing text-based user interfaces in AT&T System V Unix. curses provided features such as color, pads, and function key mapping.
ncurses is fully compatible with older version of curses, and provides a library of functions that manages an application’s display on character-cell terminals. It uses terminfo format, supports pads and color and multiple highlights and forms characters and function-key mapping, and has all the other SVr4-curses enhancements over BSD curses.
The ncurses API can be used to write text-based user interfaces, Text User Interface (TUI), in a terminal-independent manner. TUIs seem to be undergoing something of a revival at the moment as an alternative to a full GUI. ncurses is written in a way that attempts to optimize the commands that are sent to the terminal, to reduce the latency experienced when updating the displayed content.
This release focuses on improvements to the MinGW/Windows terminal driver that was introduced in 2009 and updated to provide some support for Windows Terminal beginning in 2020. While both drivers use Console API; the later Windows driver also provides for using character escape sequences. The MinGW32 driver was designed to imitate POSIX terminal I/O data types to simplify integration with the existing sources, but the newer Windows driver did not integrate with the sources in the same way, and Windows Terminal support for Console API is incomplete, lacking mouse support. Both the MinGW and Windows drivers are still provided in ncurses in the current release. The updated Windows Terminal driver adds a new win32_driver.c, and also adds a configuration check for the Win32 named pipes feature. The new version has better support for reading Unicode characters in MinGW/Windows port, and restores the scroll buffer and console mode under appropriate circumstances.
The new version also has an improved mouse driver, more checks for null pointers, and updates to the terminal database.
ncurses 6.6 is available now.
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