After a year and a half of development, the release of the library ncurses 6.5 has been announced. This library is designed for creating multiple-platform interactive console user interfaces and supports emulating the software interface curses from System v Release 4.0 (SVR4). NCURSES 6.5 is source text compatible with the NCURSES 5.X and 6.0 branches, but expands ABI. Popular applications built using NCURSES include Aptitoud, Lynx, Mutt, NCFTP, VIM, VIFM, Minicom, Mosh, Screen, TMUX, EMACS, and Less.
Among the added innovations in NCURSES 6.5 are:
- Software interfaces for low-level access to Terminfo and TermCap functions: Tiparm_s to transmit information about the expected string parameters of the terminal, and Tiscan_s to verify formatting capabilities when transmitting string parameters to Tiparm_S function. These functions help in processing damaged or incorrect files with terminal parameters (Terminfo and TermCap).
- An assembly option “–enable-check-size” to simplify initialization on terminals that do not transmit data on the size of the window or screen. This option uses the cursor position to determine the window size in Setupterm when size information is not available through environment variables or iOctl transmission.
- Functions have been added for obtaining TTY flags from structures with type Screen.
- Added inspections for safer processing of string parameters in Tiparm, Tparm, and TGoto functions.
/Reports, release notes, official announcements.