curs_delch(3)

curs_delch3

Delete a character from a curses window

Usage

#include <curses.h>

int delch(void); int wdelch(WINDOW * win); int mvdelch(int y, int x); int mvwdelch(WINDOW * win, int y, int x);

Overview

wdelch deletes the character at the cursor position in win. It moves all characters to the right of the cursor on the same line to the left one position and replaces the contents of the rightmost position on the line with the window's background character; see bkgd(3X) (wide-character API users: bkgrnd(3X)). The cursor position does not change (after moving to (y, x), if specified). ncurses(3X) describes the variants of this function.

Return value

These functions return OK on success and ERR on failure.

In ncurses, these functions fail if

•

the curses screen has not been initialized, or

•

(for functions taking a WINDOW pointer argument) win is a null pointer.

Functions prefixed with “mv” first perform cursor movement and fail if the position (y, x) is outside the window boundaries.

Notes

delch, mvdelch, and mvwdelch may be implemented as macros.

A terminal's delete_character (dch1) capability is not necessarily employed.

Portability

X/Open Curses Issue 4 describes these functions. It specifies no error conditions for them.

SVr4 describes a successful return value only as “an integer value other than ERR”.

Releases

87 releases since FreeBSD 2.0.5-RELEASE; the text changed 11 times.

  1. 2.0.5–2.1.7.1
  2. 2.2.2–3.5.1
  3. 4.0
  4. 4.1–6.2
  5. 6.3–10.4
  6. 11.0–12.4
  7. 13.0–13.5
  8. 14.0–14.1
  9. 14.2–14.4
  10. 14.5
  11. 15.0
  12. 15.1–16.0

History

SVr2 (1984) introduced wdelch.

From base 16.0-CURRENT-20261027-61c70dc16a79 in FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT (2026-10-27). Parsed by carta from the page's man source.