Curses is a hardware independent C library for writing screen-orientated
programs. Allowing the programmer to write an application which will run on anyscreen which the system has term-info for. Curses has been around for ages making it the de-facto standard for writing this type of app.
Ncurses is an GNU re-implementation, for which there is a tutorial in the Linux Programmers Guide.
Along similar lines is S-Lang. | 
