Is there any way to prevent ncurses based programs from running?
You can declare the capabilities your shell has, by setting the TERM environment variable to the correct value. For instance, if your shell has the same capabilities as the vt100 terminal, export TERM to the correct value, and programs like vim will respect that.
To run vim in vt100-mode, try:
TERM=vt100 vimYou could also try:
export TERM=dumbThe trick is to find a terminal that corresponds to the capabilities of what you are creating. There is a lot to choose from. On my system (Arch Linux) this gives me a long list of choices:
find /usr/share/terminfoYou might be able to find a terminal specification that corresponds to what your program can handle.
Alternatively, you may want to consider implementing terminal emulation for ansi or vt100:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code
http://www.termsys.demon.co.uk/vtansi.htm
Best of luck!