Curses (programming Library) - History

History

The first curses library was written by Ken Arnold and originally released with BSD UNIX, where it was used for several games, most notably Rogue.

The name "curses" is a pun on cursor optimization. Sometimes it is incorrectly stated that curses was used by the vi editor. In fact the code in curses that optimizes moving the cursor from one place on the screen to another was borrowed from vi, which predated curses.

Curses was originally implemented using the termcap library. A few years later, Mark Horton, who had made improvements to the vi and termcap sources at Berkeley, went to AT&T Corporation and made a different version using terminfo, which became part of UNIX System III and UNIX System V. Due to licensing restrictions on the latter, the BSD and AT&T versions of the library were developed independently. In addition to the termcap/terminfo improvement, other improvements were made in the AT&T version:

video highlighting (bold, underline)

The BSD version supported only standout.

line-drawing

The BSD version gave little support here.

colors

This was not anticipated in the BSD version.

AT&T curses development appears to have halted in the mid-1990s when X/Open Curses was defined. However, development of ncurses and PDCurses continues. A version of BSD curses continues to be maintained in the NetBSD operating system (wide character support, termcap to terminfo migration, etc.).