Going old school

A little background before I ask my question. I am just getting back into programming after a very long time. My oldest has developed an intense interest in coding, and combining that with electronics. Arduino is looking to be the best route likely combined with a raspberry pi. She is doing very well with the c++ tutorials so far, which makes keeping ahead of her a challenge.
I have only found one of my old books so far and none of my old prebuilt code. I know there is the ability to make an application window not running in Windows or the Linux equivalent of your choice. Such as way back when Microsoft works was actually loaded from the command prompt. While I understand it is the long/hard way of doing it, can anyone point me references on how to do that now. It will be on a Linux system. I am hoping there is someone out there that still remembers how or at least knows where to find some references to work from. I am about 18 years out of practice, but I am enjoying getting back into it.

Thanks in advance for your help!
C++ as a first language? A brave soul!

It sounds like you're talking about a terminal user interface: See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface ? Is this correct?

TUI programs on Unix-like systems generally rely on some variant of the curses library, which lives on today on in the form of a C library named NCURSES. Here is a tutorial:
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/NCURSES-Programming-HOWTO/intro.html

She is a brave soul. The stem program at school got her interested. Arduino runs on a modified C/C++. She has done exceptionally well with the sololearn tutorial. I did C/C++ for 8 years so relearning that will be easiest. Beyond the actual curriculum her teacher can't answer questions. From what I've seen many of the more common place languages are still using C as a backbone so it's a good place to start. While it's great that the buttons on the screen do xyz she wants to know why and how and why can't they do abc.

Yes thank you that is what I was looking for. I will have my work cut out for me getting back up to speed, but that is the extremely simple framework for her to be able to make little additions to and see the why. One step at a time. Then she can transition to any thing else she wants to.

Thank you so much.
Topic archived. No new replies allowed.