Terminal programming with curses is useful and fun, but it sometimes brings terminal curses.

This talk shows basics of terminals (e.g., real text terminals, terminal emulators, the controlling terminal, /dev/tty and con, pty, control characters, escape sequences, termcap/terminfo, terminal mode), pros and cons of text-based user interfaces, an introduction to curses.gem, its applications, and issues you'll face when programming with curses.