Controlling the Cursor with Curses

AIX Version 4.3 General Programming Concepts: Writing and Debugging Programs

Controlling the Cursor with Curses

In the Curses library, there are two types of cursors:

logical cursor	The cursor location within each window. A window's data structure keeps track of the location of its logical cursor. Each window has a logical cursor.
physical cursor	The display cursor. The workstation uses this cursor to write to the display. There is only one physical cursor per display.

You can only add to or erase characters at the current cursor location in a window. The following subroutines are provided for controlling the cursor:

move	Moves the logical cursor associated with the stdscr.
wmove	Moves the logical cursor associated with a user-defined window.
getbegyx	Places the beginning coordinates of the window in integer variables y and x.
getmaxyx	Places the size of the window in integer variables y and x.
getsyx	Returns the current coordinates of the virtual screen cursor.
getyx	Returns the position of the logical cursor associated with a specified window.
leaveok	Controls physical cursor placement after a call to the wrefresh subroutine.
mvcur	Moves the physical cursor.
setsyx	Sets the virtual screen cursor to the specified coordinate.

After a call to the refresh or wrefresh subroutine, curses places the physical cursor at the last updated character position in the window. To leave the physical cursor where it is and not move it after a refresh, call the leaveok subroutine with the Window parameter set to the desired window and the Flag parameter set to TRUE.

Related Information

Curses Overview for Programming

Understanding Terminals with Curses.