curs_printw(3X) Library calls curs_printw(3X)
NAME
printw, wprintw, mvprintw, mvwprintw, vwprintw, vw_printw - write
formatted output to a curses window
SYNOPSIS
#include <curses.h>
int printw(const char *fmt, ...);
int wprintw(WINDOW *win, const char *fmt, ...);
int mvprintw(int y, int x, const char *fmt, ...);
int mvwprintw(WINDOW *win, int y, int x, const char *fmt, ...);
int vw_printw(WINDOW *win, const char *fmt, va_list varglist);
/* obsolete */
int vwprintw(WINDOW *win, const char *fmt, va_list varglist);
DESCRIPTION
printw, wprintw, mvprintw, and mvwprintw are analogous to printf(3). In
effect, the string that would be output by printf(3) is instead output as
though waddstr(3X) were used with win (or stdscr) as its first argument.
vwprintw and vw_printw are analogous to vprintf(3), and perform a wprintw
using a variable argument list. The third argument is a va_list, a
pointer to a list of arguments, as defined in stdarg.h.
RETURN VALUE
These functions return ERR upon failure and OK upon success.
In ncurses, failure occurs if the library cannot allocate enough memory
for the buffer into which the output is formatted, or if the window
pointer win is null.
Functions prefixed with "mv" first perform cursor movement and fail if
the position (y, x) is outside the window boundaries.
NOTES
No wide character counterpart functions are defined by the "wide" ncurses
configuration nor by any standard. To format and write a wide-character
string to a curses window, consider using swprintf(3) and waddwstr(3X) or
similar.
PORTABILITY
X/Open Curses Issue 4 describes these functions. It specifies no error
conditions for them.
ncurses defines vw_printw and vwprintw identically to support legacy
applications. However, the latter is obsolete.
o X/Open Curses Issue 4 Version 2 (1996), marked vwprintw as requiring
varargs.h and "TO BE WITHDRAWN", and specified vw_printw using the
stdarg.h interface.
o X/Open Curses Issue 5, Draft 2 (December 2007) marked vwprintw (along
with vwscanw and the termcap interface) as withdrawn. After
incorporating review comments, this became X/Open Curses Issue 7
(2009).
o ncurses provides vwprintw, but marks it as deprecated.
HISTORY
4BSD (1980) introduced wprintw and its variants. It implemented all as
functions, not macros; this initial distribution of curses preceded the
ANSI C standard of 1989, prior to which a variadic macro facility was not
widely available in the language. printw went unused in Berkeley
distributions until 4.1cBSD (1983), which employed it in games. 4BSD's
wprintw did not use varargs.h, which had been available since Seventh
Edition Unix (1979). In 1991 (a couple of years after SVr4 was generally
available, and after the C standard was published), other developers
updated the library, using stdarg.h internally in 4.4BSD curses. Even
with this improvement, BSD curses did not use function prototypes (nor
even declare functions) in curses.h until 1992.
4BSD documented printw and wprintw tersely as "printf on stdscr" and
"printf on win", respectively.
SVr3 summarized the functions in three lines, asserting that they were
analogous to printf(3) and explaining that the string that printf(3)
would write to the standard output stream would instead be output using
waddstr to the given window.
SVr3 added vwprintw, describing its third parameter as a va_list, defined
in varargs.h, and referred the reader to the manual pages for varargs and
vprintf for detailed descriptions.
SVr4 (1989) introduced no new variations of printw, but provided for
using either varargs.h or stdarg.h to define the va_list type.
X/Open Curses Issue 4 (1995), defined vw_printw to replace vwprintw,
stating that its va_list type is defined in stdarg.h.
SEE ALSO
curses(3X), curs_addstr(3X), curs_scanw(3X), printf(3), vprintf(3)
ncurses 6.6 2025-08-16 curs_printw(3X)