Ncurses is a programming library providing an [wiki:Application_programming_interface API], allowing the programmer to write text-based user interfaces, Text User Interface ([wiki:Text_User_Interface TUI]), in a terminal-independent manner. It also optimizes screen changes, in order to reduce the latency experienced when using remote Unix shell.

Ncurses stands for "new curses", and is a replacement for the discontinued 4.4BSD classic [wiki:Curses_%28programming_library%29 curses].

Ncurses is a part of the ["GNU"] project. It is one of the few GNU files not distributed under the GNU General Public License or GNU Lesser General Public License; it is distributed under a license like the X11 License, which is sometimes referred to as the MIT License. .