I can tell you why people still use ncurses: if you’re actually interested in accounting for all the nuanced eldritch madness that is terminal emulation impleme

I can tell you why people still use ncurses: if you’re actually interested in accounting for all the nuanced eldritch madness that is terminal emulation implementation and history it’s a monumental effort, at least imo. Sure, if all you care about is coloring text on recent terminals, I do think just using ansi codes is fine. However, I completely disagree with the assertion that hardcoding ansi codes is somehow “more readable” than using a well-named API call that abstracts such detail away from the user. Maybe I’m alone in this, but I really don’t want to waste brain space memorizing ansi codes. Yeah I can write my own library or little macros to do this but…why? If I’m doing anything more involved than coloring text why wouldn’t I just pull in the lib I need? There’s no way in hell I want to maintain a custom implementation of terminal cursor movement for kicks. I’d much rather reach for a battle tested library that scores of other devs have already used and improved upon, whether it’s ncurses or one of the more modern TUI libs. Also, it’s become cool recently to hate ncurses for some reason. Are there things ncurses should do differently from today’s perspective? Sure. Is it’s api awkward to use in the face of modern programming features and paradigms that we’re now used to? Sure. But on the whole it’s design is really solid and it has plentiful documentation. Whenever I see rants like this I get the impression the author is a person that lacks an appreciation for history and the way technical development proceeds in general and imagines they are our technical savior, come down from the heavens to enlighten all us blindered fools about how terrible X is. If you want to educate people about ansi codes, great. A really inefficient way to do that is to wrap your advice in an obnoxious rant.