Discovering ncurses, the GUI for the Linux Console

“The CLI versus GUI debate is well-known, but sometimes, drawing
a hard line between text-only interfaces and graphical interfaces
is too restrictive. Most of the time, if you’re using a terminal
(whether over SSH or on the console), the CLI and text-only
interface works great. Sometimes, though, it can be a real
advantage to be able to use at least some graphical logic, without
having to fire up an X server. Not all servers run X; you don’t
always want to forward X to your remote terminal; or you may be at
a stage of system or hardware install that prevents you from
running a regular graphical interface.

“This is where ncurses comes in. The ncurses library allows you
to write programs that work in a GUI-like way, but which will run
within a normal terminal emulator.

“You’ve almost certainly already encountered programs that use
ncurses, including:

“screen, which allows you to run multiple screens in a single
terminal window (this uses the terminfo information from ncurses
but does its own screen-handling).

“make menuconfig, a tool which gives you a menu-driven user
interface when configuring the Linux kernel before building
it.”

Complete
Story