Curses Development Kit

Curses Development Kit (or CDK for short) is a handy open-source library that’s totally free to use. It’s built in C and follows POSIX standards. This software is designed to help Ncurses developers by giving them a bunch of widgets they can use to create curses programs easily.

About the Creator

CDK was first put together by Mike Glover, but it has seen some awesome updates from Thomas E. Dickey. Thanks to his work, it now supports more platforms and comes packed with powerful features! If you’ve used dialog software before, you’ll find CDK quite familiar.

Linking Widgets Made Easy

One of the best parts about the Curses Development Kit is how easy it makes linking its widgets into your applications. Right now, CDK works with a variety of operating systems like Linux, Solaris, SunOS (with 5lib), HP-UX, QNX 4, and AIX.

Installing CDK on GNU/Linux

If you want to get started with the Curses Development Kit on your GNU/Linux system, it’s pretty simple! Just download the latest version here. Save that file somewhere on your computer and unpack it using an archive manager you like. Then, fire up your Terminal app.

Navigating Your Files

In the terminal window, use the ‘cd’ command to go to where you unpacked those files. For example: cd /home/softpedia/cdk-5.0-20141106. After that, optimize everything for your hardware by running ./configure, then compile the software with make. Lastly, run make install, either as root or using sudo make install, so it installs system-wide.

A Peek Under the Hood

If we take a closer look at CDK, we can see that it's all written in C. It supports various operating systems including GNU/Linux and others we mentioned earlier. Plus, both 64-bit and 32-bit architectures are supported right now!