Ack, my bad. I meant OS X 10.11 (El Capitan). Same should probably work on any Linux distro with standard build tools installed.

I keep a ~/local directory with built-from-source programs in it. That way I don't get any conflicts with system-wide package managers.

Configure line for ncurses:

  ./configure  --enable-pc-files --with-pkg-config-libdir=$HOME/local/lib/pkgconfig --with-shared --prefix=$HOME/local
  make -j8 && make install

And for htop, a regular configure worked fine:

  ./configure --prefix=$HOME/local
  make -j8 && make install

A quick check in my .bashrc (actually .zshrc) prepends $HOME/local/bin to my $PATH if it exists.

I too would like to know how to install via brew.