termbox VS S-Lang

Most answers were a code-golf style with writing the full functionality in least number of lines of code. I took a different approach. Since some time already I wanted to try out Ratatouille - an Elixir toolkit for writing TUI (Terminal UI), based on termbox.

If you want to go lower-level, then I would recommend against ncurses, and instead start with notcurses or termbox. termbox has lots of language bindings, but the author is no longer maintaining it. Still, not a bad place to start from. If you do decide to get into ncurses, this doc can get you over some of the humps with keyboard/screen/mouse.

Alternatively, there's termbox: https://github.com/nsf/termbox (minimalistic). Or prompt_toolkit: https://github.com/prompt-toolkit/python-prompt-toolkit (huge).

I recently found a little C-like scripting language, S-Lang (aka slang) that is a stack machine that allows some explicit stack manipulation. This almost feels like programming directly in Java VM byte codes or FORTH. Not for the faint of heart.

[1] https://github.com/hankem/S-Lang

The S-Lang programming library is a software library for Unix, Windows, VMS, OS/2, and Mac OS X. It provides routines for embedding an interpreter for the S-Lang scripting language, and components to facilitate the creation of text-based applications.[3] The latter class of functions include routines for constructing and manipulating keymaps, an interactive line-editing facility, and both low- and high-level screen/terminal management functions. It is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.