# Introduction

ncurses (new curses) is a free software emulation of curses in System V Rel 4.0 (and above). It uses terminfo format, supports pads, colors, multiple highlights, form characters and function key mapping. Because of the interactive nature of this library, it will be of little use for writing Web applications, but may be useful when writing scripts meant using PHP from the command line.

The features available, such as colors, depend on the terminal that you are using. Use functions such as ncurses_has_colors(), ncurses_can_change_color(), and ncurses_has_ic() to check for individual capabilities.

> Note:

> This extension has been moved to the » PECL repository and is no longer bundled with PHP as of PHP 5.3.0.

ncurses is available for the following platforms:

- AIX
- BeOS
- BSD variants (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD)
- Cygwin
- Digital Unix (aka OSF1)
- GNU/Linux
- HPUX
- IRIX64
- macOS
- OS/2
- QNX
- SCO OpenServer
- Solaris
- Tru64