dankamongmen/notcurses

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

4680 stars · 159 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Notcurses is a C library (with C++, Rust, and Python bindings) for building complex, vibrant textual user interfaces on modern terminal emulators, supporting 24-bit color, Unicode, multimedia, and threads. It is not a source-compatible replacement for NCURSES, but enables effects impossible with it.

Use cases

• build rich TUI applications with truecolor and Unicode
• render images and video in the terminal
• create animated terminal dashboards
• write terminal apps with transparency and sprite effects
• replace ncurses for a modern terminal UI library
• build interactive CLI tools with multimedia support

When to choose

• you need vivid colors, images, or video in a terminal app
• you're starting a new TUI project and aren't tied to curses compatibility
• you need Unicode, bidirectional text, and wide glyph support
• you want C, C++, Rust, or Python bindings for terminal UIs

When to avoid

• you need a drop-in X/Open Curses-compatible replacement for existing ncurses code
• you must support very old or minimal terminal emulators
• you need a lightweight dependency for simple text UIs

Facets

library · maturity active

ui-components graphics terminal-ui image-processing video-processing developer-tools cross-platform windows bsd c cpp python rust cli tui ncurses-alternative character-graphics unicode multimedia terminal-graphics command-line linux macos

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