Ncurses is a programming library providing an API, allowing the programmer to write text-based user interfaces, TUIs, in a terminal-independent manner. It also optimizes screen changes, in order to reduce the latency experienced when using remote Unix shell.
Ncurses stands for “new curses”, and is a replacement for the discontinued 4.4BSD classic curses.
Ncurses is a part of the GNU project. It is one of the few GNU files not distributed under the GNU General Public License or GNU Lesser General Public License; it is distributed under a license like the X11 License, which is sometimes referred to as the MIT License.