Which Curses Library

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Which curses library should I use?
The NetHack Curses Interface has been tested against two main curses libraries: PDCurses and Ncurses. There are other curses implmentations as well, but I have not tested with any of them.

PDCurses
PDCurses is a cross-platform curses library. There are native ports for Windows, DOS, and OS/2. Additionally, there is a port to X11 (XCurses) that works on UNIX systems running X11, and a port to SDL that works on Windows, UNIX, and Mac OS X (and possibly other systems, with a little work).

I am very fond of the SDL version of PDCurses; it looks nice, and runs smoothly, and is cross-platform. It uses a code page 437 font by default, which means that the IBMGraphics option works, regardless of the platform or the system locale. I strongly recommend trying this version for playing NetHack locally. As a side note, the binary releases use the SDL version of PDCurses.

On Windows, there is a new Windows GUI port of PDCurses, which looks nice. It supports more text attributes than any other implementation, and has a neat feature that lets you zoom the window to make the text bigger or smaller. This is a work in progress, and while it seems to work fine with NetHack, there may still be a few bugs to iron out.

Ncurses
Ncurses is a curses implmentation that is standard on many UNIX systems. It is primarily a UNIX-based library, but has been ported to a number of other systems as well. The Curses windowport works well with Ncurses. The main advantage over using PDCurses would be the ability to play remotely via telnet or ssh.