Clearing only part of the console output

Question

What I want to do:

The cursor is initially blinking on the top left corner of the screen:

160 characters remaining
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Answer 1

If you want to manage the complete screen, curses is the way to go. Otherwise, you can do a lot just using escape sequences; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code, for example. (Historically, such sequences varied from one terminal to the next, and curses was originally a way of working around this. Today, the ANSI escape codes are pretty universal for console windows under a windowing system, being used by both Windows console window and xterm.)

In addition to encapsulating the actual sequences, curses supports character oriented input, with or without echo. This is more difficult to do without curses, and is still very unportable.