First, switch it to alternative screen mode... printf("\033?1047h"); then clear and move and such with other similar prints. See the list here : http://invisibl

First, switch it to alternative screen mode... printf("\033?1047h"); then clear and move and such with other similar prints. See the list here : http://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.html http://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.html It really is pretty simple. The big benefit of ncurses is if you want to target terminals other than xterm compatible ones, and they are so rare nowadays that you can really just ignore them.... Input is quite a pain though (however, ncurses sometimes get it wrong too), but the same thing applies, you just need to switch to raw mode with tcsetattr and then have some kind of select() loop or something to watch for escape sequences then translate them into interesting key presses. Mouse events are the same btw: you write out a sequence to turn them on, then the terminal sends them as sequences to stdin. I wrote a terminal library myself for the D programming language (and a terminal emulator too!), it is kinda ugly code but it isn't hard.