Messing about with Ncurses

For a long time I've been aware of Ncurses, but I've never actually used it. So when I accidentally wandered across this tutorial for using Ncurses in Xcode, I decided that it would be worth checking out.

But, when I found myself with a few spare minutes... I was sitting in front of a machine running Debian Linux rather than Mac OS X. So I experimented there instead. To get the snakey program to run I had to do the following:

  1. First of all, I had to get the ncurses stuff:
    sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev

  2. Then I had to compile the example code (I had renamed the program to box.c):
    gcc box.c -lncurses -o box

  3. Then finally, I could run it:

So that was pretty easy. Ncurses is one of those things that I'd like to mess about with some more, because I still like running stuff in a console window.