may miss other important features ... hmm you mean like handling the ga-billion different terminals out there? Or the signal handling you need to ensure your terminal is usable after some wayward error? Or the differing curses libraries (I forget which one Curses is built on). Or are you talking about the simple stuff like how to carve up a screen for user input and display? Wether to always have a command line or display it automatically or with newer libs - pop-ups? O'Reilly has a good book on programming curses but it's C based.

Sorry to sound sarcastic but I was so so so happy when the web came around so I could abandon curses programming. The last curses based app I worked on (C based), I cheated and used curses just for the menuing system. For display, I shelled out to whatever editor the user configured. That made life easier for all involved. The end users loved not having to learn new keystrokes and I loved not having to write curses code.

But then again, there may be some monks out there that thrived on it - to each his own.

-derby