What would be a good alternative to ncurses that would work under the emacs shell?

Question

I am an avid user of Emacs and I love shell-mode, which, in my opinion, brings the best of two worlds: Emacs buffers and terminal emulators. For me, the biggest decline in shell mode is that ncurses-based applications will not display correctly. Having the need to develop and code a small monitoring application in C that reads and writes to standard input and output (I think something like htop), I would love to use the framework, and I would really like my application to work in shell mode, what framework would you recommend to me?

NB: I'm not interested in mouse capture.

Answer 1

There is nothing like ncurses that works in Emacs shell mode. This is a fundamental limitation of the design of the comint mode on which shell mode is built: it only works with programs that alternately read entire lines of plain text from stdin and write entire lines of plain text to stdout.

If you want to run something more interesting, you need to use a full terminal emulator (which, of course, Emacs), or write a special Emacs interface that uses Emacs buffers initially.