Introduction to Ncurses (Part 1)

Welcome to the series of Ncurses library in C++. In this, you will learn basics and some tidbits of ncurses.

NCurses is a programming library that provides an application programming interface that allows the programmer to write text-based user interfaces in a terminal independent manner.

To use ncurses we use ncurses.h header

#include <ncurses.h>

Some functions that must be used in all ncurses

• initscr()
  • initializes screen
  • sets up memory and clean the screen
• refresh()
  • refreshes the screen to match what's in the memory on the screen
• endwin()
  • deallocates memory and ends ncurses
• getch()
  • waits for user input
  • returns the ASCII value of that key

To compile we must link the libncurses while compilation.

$ g++ <program file> -lncurses -o <output file name>

An obligatory hello-world program in ncurses

#include <ncurses.h>
using namespace std;

int main(int argc, char ** argv)
{
    // init screen and sets up screen
    initscr();

    // print to screen
    printw("Hello World");

    // refreshes the screen
    refresh();

    // pause the screen output
    getch();

    // deallocates memory and ends ncurses
    endwin();
    return 0;
}

Before using ncurses make sure it's installed in your system
Programs using NCurses

• Installing in Linux
• Installing in Windows

Here are some tools and IDE using ncurses library

• HTop
• GNU Nano Text Editor