Curses Development Kit

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.

Getting started with Curses Development Kit

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 Softoware 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/softoware/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.

Under the hood and supported operating systems

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.

What is new in this release:

• This version adds scroller.h to the list of installed header files and adds packaging scripts used for testing cross-compiles to MingW.

What is new in version 5.0-20120323:

• use gmtime instead of localtime in a few places so that calendar results are not offset by the hour of the day (report/analysis by Alex Charis).
• add configure option --enable-const, which defines, like NCURSES_CONST, the symbol CDK_CONST which can be used to address improved const checking while preserving source-compatibility.
• revise copyChtypeList to correspond with copyCharList
• use const in cdk_util function prototypes, similar "string" uses to improve writable-strings warnings. Arrays of strings are not addressed due to compatibility.
• change document directory to /usr/share/doc
• add configure --enable-hdr-subdir to control whether cdk.h should be in /usr/include/cdk for example, or in /usr/include. Make the default the latter, standard layout.
• simplify dpkg script, provide only one library using ncursesw
• updated configure script macros, many changes for portability.
• add cdk_test.h to installed headers (Debian #500161). Resolution of that bug report by the way did not actually install the requested header file.
• update config.guess, config.sub

What is new in version 5.0-20110517:

• This version provides several minor bugfixes and improvements.
• Most of the changes are for code cleanup.
• RPM and dpkg scripts were also added.

What is new in version 5.0-20090215:

• This release updates the configure script to work with non-POSIX locales and use current ncurses config scripts.
• It improves handling of empty lists.