curses was pulled out of Rogue

Every terminal user interface you have used, from htop to vim's split windows, descends from a library that was written so a dungeon crawler could run on whichever terminal you happened to own.

The problem

In the late 1970s there was no single way to draw on a screen. Each terminal had its own escape sequences for moving the cursor or clearing a line. Bill Joy's termcap database, written for vi, described those differences. But a program still had to decide, character by character, how to turn a change on screen into the cheapest sequence of bytes, because terminals were slow.

The game

Rogue redraws a whole dungeon every turn, so it needed exactly that: describe the screen you want, and let a library work out the minimal update. Ken Arnold, at Berkeley, wrote curses to do this, and it shipped with BSD Unix, which is how it reached everything else.

What came after

• System V reworked curses and replaced termcap with terminfo, written by Mary Ann Horton.
• ncurses is the free reimplementation, maintained for decades largely by Thomas Dickey.
• Modern Rust TUI crates such as ratatui keep the same idea: diff the screen you want against the one you have, and emit only the changes.

initscr();                    /* take over the terminal */
mvaddch(5, 10, '@');          /* put the hero at row 5, column 10 */
refresh();                    /* send only what changed */
endwin();

The name is a joke that stuck: it is short for cursor optimisation.

Draft: dates and attributions above still need checking against primary sources before this goes live.