Using the “alternate screen” in a bash script

Question

The alternate screen is used by many \"user-interactive\" terminal applications like vim, htop, screen, alsamixer, less, ... It is like a different buffer of the te

Answer 1

For C console application:

ncurses

Wikipedia:

ncurses (new curses) is a programming library that provides an API which allows the programmer to write text-based user interfaces in a terminal-independent manner.

less uses this library.

A hello world program from here, to compile it in gcc, flag -lncurses is needed.

#include 

int main()
{   
    initscr();          /* Start curses mode          */
    printw("Hello World !!!");  /* Print Hello World          */
    refresh();          /* Print it on to the real screen */
    getch();            /* Wait for user input */
    endwin();           /* End curses mode        */

    return 0;
}