I'm trying to make a program that will present a nice XWindows interface when run on the desktop, but will fall back to a ncurses interface if X is not available. The idea is to have a nice interface when I can, but still provide a windowing interface on systems that don't have X installed. I know SuSE's YaST2 admin tool does this, and I'm wondering if there are any packages out there that provide this ability.

What I'd like ideally is a library which abstracts the UI, so I just write to one API and it takes care of deciding if it should use a graphical or a text interface. Does anyone know of such a library, or any projects that are trying to develop one?

What you have to do is to write two interfaces to the program.

First test if DISPLAY is set , or -display host:0.0 is given on the command line.

Try to connect to the DISPLAY.

If it succeeds, go into the X loop part of the code.

It if fails, go into the ncurses interface part of the code.