ncurses is a programming library providing an API, allowing the programmer to write text user interfaces 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 4.4 BSD classic curses. Ncursesw has additional wide-character (unicode) support. Ncurses and Ncursesw libraries are source-compatible, but not binary-compatible.