panel
—
z-order for curses windows
Z-order for curses windows (libpanel, -lpanel)
Overlapping curses windows have no notion of z-order, what you see on the screen
depends on the order of updates. The panel
library is
an extension built on top of
curses(3) that adds z-order to
curses windows.
Each panel has an associated curses window. All currently visible
panels form a “deck”. Panels have z-order only relative to
other panels in the deck and to stdscr. The latter doesn't have a panel of
its own but implicitly lies below all other panels in the deck. If you mix
plain curses windows and panels, the visual results are undefined since the
panel library is not aware of windows that are not associated with
panels.