• Synopsis
• History
• Subsets of the Distribution
• Download ncurses
• Download tack
• Terminal Database

Synopsis

See the ncurses release announcement or the FAQ

History

Ncurses has an involved history:

• The package was originated as pcurses, written by Pavel Curtis around 1982, maintained by various people through 1986.
• It was later polished (e.g., ANSI prototypes, reformatted, some bug fixes, but still essentially the same package). and re-issued as ncurses 1.8.1 in late 1993 by Zeyd Ben-Halim.
• Subsequent work (through 1.8.8) was driven by Eric Raymond, who eradicated previous signs of authorship with the current copyright notice between 1.8.7 and 1.8.8, early 1995.
• Later, this extended to incorporating the forms and menus libraries written by Juergen Pfeifer, and a panel library written by Warren Tucker. Adding these libraries almost doubled the size of the package.
• There are even a few chunks from BSD curses (in tset and part of the logic which reads termcap data for tgetent).

Ncurses is the work of dozens of people. Some are listed in the credits.

My involvement with ncurses dates back to the 1.8.1 release. I was looking for an avenue to make a SystemV-based curses support resizable windows (e.g., in an xterm). This is easily achievable with BSD-curses, but not with the distributed versions of SystemV curses. Ncurses 1.8.1 was too immature (dumped core, was not portable, etc).

I revisited it in mid-1994, after an initial pass of making ded auto-configured. Ncurses 1.8.5 was advertised as 100% SVr4 compatible. I designed a minimal interface for resizeterm, proposing it to Zeyd, who promised it would be in 1.8.6 (it wasn't). Coming back to 1.8.7, I found that the color support was broken (specifically for add, which I had colorized using PDCurses with MS-DOS). Since the package is useless to me unless it implements faithfully the SVr4 interface, I approached Eric in early 1995 with my growing list of problems.

Since then, I've corrected the implementation of color, terminal modes, implemented resizing, as well as the configuration scripts, and resolved numerous reliability and portability issues.

There is further work to do: the screen optimization has not been rigorously tested, there are interesting problems to work out with internationalization, etc.

Here are links to the changelog for ncurses:

• an index by date
• the changelog in html form (very large)
• NEWS.gz (gzip'd copy of the actual changelog)

Subsets of the Distribution

Starting with release 5.8, the source includes scripts which automate the process of building tarballs of useful subsets. These are

• Ada95 binding
• test/sample programs

Download ncurses

• The ncurses source (gzip'd tar)
• Development rollup and incremental diff's
• The ncurses source (gzip'd tar via http)
• Development ncurses source (gzip'd tar via http)

Download tack

• The tack source (gzip'd tar)
• The tack source (gzip'd tar via http)
• Development tack source (gzip'd tar via http)

Terminal Database

The current terminfo/termcap sources are available via http. They require tic/infocmp from ncurses 5.7 or later, since they use a feature which was broken in previous releases.

• Development terminfo source (gzip'd text via http)
• Development termcap source (gzip'd text via http)

You may also find the discussion of tctest useful.