Curses Development Kit For Linux

Curses Development Kit (also known as CDK) is an open source, free and POSIX compliant library software implemented in C and designed from the ground up to provide Ncurses developers with a collection of widgets that can be used for building curses programs.

Initially created by Mike Glover, the Curses Development Kit library has been improved and extended by Thomas E. Dickey to support more platforms, as well as to include powerful functionality. It is very similar to the dialog software.

Curses developers can easily and quickly link the widgets included in the Curses Development Kit library into their applications. At the moment, CDK supports Linux, Solaris, SunOS (using 5lib), HP-UX, QNX 4 and AIX operating systems.

To install and use the Curses Development Kit library on your GNU/Linux operating system, you will have to download the latest version of the program from Softpedia or via its official website (see link at the end of the article), save the archive somewhere on your computer, unpack it using your favorite archive manager utility and open the built-in Terminal app.

In the terminal emulator window, use the ‘cd’ command to navigate to the location of the extracted archive files (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/cdk-5.0-20141106), optimize the program for your hardware architecture using the ‘./configure’ command, then run the ‘make’ command to compile the software, followed by the ‘make install’ command as root or the ‘sudo make install’ command as a privileged user to install it system wide.

Taking a look under the hood of the Curses Development Kit library, we can notice that it is written entirely in the C programming lannguage. Supported operating systems include GNU/Linux, Solaris, SunOS (using 5lib), AIX, QNX 4 and HP-UX. Both 64-bit and 32-bit instruction set architectures are supported at this time.