Chapter 4 CURSES

The CURSES screen management package consists of routines and macros for creating and modifying input and output to a terminal screen. CURSES contains routines for creating windows, highlighting text, writing to the screen, reading from user input, and moving the cursor.

The CURSES package is designed to optimize screen update activities. For example, when updating the screen, CURSES minimizes the number of characters sent to the terminal to move and update the screen.

CURSES is a terminal-independent package, providing a common user interface to a variety of terminal types. Its portability is facilitated by the TERMINFO database, which contains a compiled definition of each terminal type. By referring to the database information, CURSES gains access to low-level details about individual terminals.

CURSES tailors its activities to the terminal type specified by the TERM environment variable. The TERM environment variable may be set in the MPE/iX shell by entering:

   export TERM=terminal_name

Hewlett-Packard systems default to the hp2392a terminal name.