No, I don't want to use ncurses, because I want to learn how the terminal works and have fun programming it on my own. :) It doesn't have to be portable, it has to work on linux xterm-based terminal emulators only.
What I want to do is programming an interactive terminal application like htop and vim are. What I mean is not the output of characters which look like boxes or setting colors, this is trivial; also to make the content fit to the window size. What I need is
how to get mouse interactions like clicking on a character and scrolling the mouse wheel (when the mouse is at a specific character) to implement scrolling [EDIT: in a terminal emulator of course], and
how to completely save and restore the output of the parent process and seperate my printing from its output, so after leaving my application nothing but the command I entered in the shell should be there, like when running htop and quitting it again: nothing is visible from this application anymore.
I really don't want to use ncurses. But of course, if you know which part of ncurses is responsible for these tasks, you're welcome to tell me where in the source code I can find it, so I will study it.