Every curses window has a backgroundcharacter property: in the library's non-wide configuration, it is a
curses character (chtype) that combines a set of attributes (and, if colors are enabled, a color pair
identifier) with a character code. When erasing (parts of) a window, curses replaces the erased cells
with the background character.
curses also uses the background character when writing characters to a populated window.
• The attribute part of the background character combines with all non-blank character cells in the
window, as populated by the waddch(3NCURSES) and winsch(3NCURSES) families of functions (and those
that call them).
• Both the character code and attributes of the background character combine with blank character cells
in the window.
The background character's set of attributes becomes a property of the character cell and move with it
through any scrolling and insert/delete line/character operations. To the extent possible on the
terminal type, curses displays the attributes of the background character as the graphic rendition of a
character cell on the display.
bkgd,wbkgdbkgd and wbkgd set the background property of stdscr or the specified window and then apply this setting
to every character cell in that window.
• The rendition of every character in the window changes to the new background rendition.
• Wherever the former background character appears, it changes to the new background character.
ncurses updates the rendition of each character cell by comparing the character, non-color attributes,
and color pair selection. The library applies the following procedure to each cell in the window,
whether or not it is blank.
• ncurses first compares the cell's character to the previously specified background character; if they
match, ncurses writes the new background character to the cell.
• ncurses then checks whether the cell uses color; that is, its color pair value is nonzero. If not,
it simply replaces the attributes and color pair in the cell with those from the new background
character.
• If the cell uses color, and its background color matches that of the current window background,
ncurses removes attributes that may have come from the current background and adds those from the new
background. It finishes by setting the cell's background to use the new window background color.
• If the cell uses color, and its background color does not match that of the current window
background, ncurses updates only the non-color attributes, first removing those that may have come
from the current background, and then adding attributes from the new background.
If the new background's character is non-spacing (for example, if it is a control character), ncurses
retains the existing background character, except for one special case: ncurses treats a background
character code of zero (0) as a space.
If the terminal does not support color, or if color has not been initialized with start_color(3NCURSES),
ncurses ignores the new background character's color pair selection.
bkgdset,wbkgdsetbkgdset and wbkgdset manipulate the background of the applicable window, without updating the character
cells as bkgd and wbkgd do; only future writes reflect the updated background.
getbkgdgetbkgd returns the given window's background character, attributes, and color pair as a chtype.