Recipes/tutorials/libraries for GUI-like terminal navigation (vim/lynx-style)?

Question

Several console based applications like vim or lynx offer a rich user interface which enables the user to navigate freely around the console, manipulate data directly on screen, access menus and much more, similar to "modern" gui applications. How is that being achieved in principal on Unix/Linux with C++? Do you directly manipulate some kind of character buffer or is the screen constantly cleared and reprinted to stdout? Is there a set of libraries to implement such behavior or even some kind of a "modern" event-driven GUI toolkit for the console?

Answer 1

The ncurses library.