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You could probably write raw ANSI escape sequences -- they're essentially universal by this point. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code

ncurses is overkill nowadays when everything is a (VT100) emulator.

Yup, that's how most of these curses libraries work. It's a lot of work doing layout with straight up escape sequences, though.

Here's [0] a small IRC client that uses escape sequences for its UI if you want to look at it. Not mine.