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 shells.
Ncurses stands for "new curses", and is a replacement for the discontinued 4.4BSD classic curses.
Ncurses is a part of the GNU project, see [1] (http://www.gnu.org/software/ncurses/ncurses.html).