curses in NetBSD

NetBSD is one of the last operating systems (or even the last one?) not using ncurses. As curses is not as specified as you could wish, there are some differences to consider.

Note: This article covers curses as well as libform and libmenu, which are bundled together with ncurses.

This is meant to be an (naturally incomplete) list of what the programmer has to care for.

• new_item(3) in NetBSD's curses copies the string you pass to it, while ncurses' new_item(3) just sets a pointer.
• post_menu(3) in NetBSD's curses will return E_NO_ROOM if the names of the items are too long for the menu, while ncurses' post_menu(3) will just cut them.
• getnstr(3) in NetBSD's curses will read up to N characters including NUL byte, while ncurses' getnstr(3) will read up to N characters not including NUL byte thus assuming buffer of size N+1