After a year and a half of development, the release of the library ncurses 6.6 has been announced. This library is designed for creating multi-platform interactive console user interfaces and supports emulation of the curses software interface from System V Release 4.0 (SVr4). The ncurses 6.6 release is source compatible with the ncurses 5.x and 6.x branches, but extends the ABI. Popular applications built using ncurses include aptitude, lynx, mutt, ncftp, vim, vifm, minicom, mosh, screen, tmux, emacs, and less.
Among the added innovations in the ncurses 6.6 release are a new terminal driver for Windows/MinGW that supports Windows Terminal and provides the ability to use the mouse, extended capabilities for infocmp, tic, and tput utilities, and new code examples and demo applications in the ncurses-examples set. Additionally, support has been added for terminals such as ghostty, illumos, sun-16color, sun-256color, sun-direct, ms-terminal-direct, pangoterm, rlogin-color, sclp, vt520-w, and vt525-w.
Furthermore, components like linux+lockeys, xterm+r5+lockeys, xterm+r5+fkeys, vt100+pf1-pf4, vt220+ufkeys, vt220+sfkeys, ecma+standout, ecma+underline, and wyse+cvis have been implemented. Mouse support is now available in the ms-terminal when using the new Windows drivers, color support has been added for the vt525 terminal, and the capabilities of the assembly system have been expanded. New options such as “–enable-install-prefix” and “–enable-named-pipes” have been included in the configure build script.