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Curses-based software is software whose user interface is implemented through the Curses library, or a compatible library (such as Ncurses).

Curses is designed to facilitate GUI-like functionallity on a text-only device, such as a PC running in console mode, a hardware ANSI terminal, a Telnet or SSH client, or similar.

Curses-based programs often have a user interface that resembles a traditional graphical user interface, including 'widgets' such as text boxes and scrollable lists, rather than the command line interface (CLI) most commonly found on text-only devices. This can make them more user-friendly than a CLI-based program, while still being able to run on text-only devices. Curses-based software can also have a lighter resource footprint and operate on a wider range of systems (both in terms of hardware and software) than their GUI-based counterparts.

However, not all Curses-based software employs a text user interface which resembles a graphical user interface. One counterexample would be the popular vi text editor, which while not being CLI-based, uses memorized keyboard commands almost exclusively, rather than the prompting TUI/GUI style, which relies more on recognition than recall.

Curses is most commonly associated with Unix-like operating systems, although implementations for Windows also exist.

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