https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/man/
curs_printw(3x) Library calls curs_printw(3x)
printw, wprintw, mvprintw, mvwprintw, vwprintw, vw_printw - write
formatted output to a curses window
#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);
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.
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.
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.
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 However, the latter is obsolete.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requiring varargs.h and "TO BE WITHDRAWN", and specified vw_printw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(along with vwscanw and the termcap interface) as withdrawn.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.
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.
curses(3x), curs_addstr(3x), curs_scanw(3x), printf(3), vprintf(3)
ncurses 6.5 2025-08-16 curs_printw(3x)