Curses library
Curses is a Text-mode screen handling library originally written by Ken Arnold for Rogue. Since most roguelike games are textmode and, well, roguelike, curses is often used in their development.
Links
Tutorials
Writing programs with NCURSES [1]
Ncurses programming guide
Curses Implementations
NCurses
NCurses for Ruby
PDCurses
[TinyCurses TinyCurses]