curses move backwards accounting for previous lines

Question

Is there any way to move the cursor backwards while accounting for previous lines, i.e. when the cursor goes back from the beginning of the line it goes to the last non-empty character of the previous line?

Answer 1

So there's no built in method for this, so I had to write my own

void backspace(){

  int x,y;
  getyx(stdscr,y,x);

  if(x == 0) {

    if( y == 0 ) {

      return;
    }

    x = getmaxx(stdscr) - 1;

    move(--y,x);

    char ch = ' ';

    while(ch == ' ' && x != 0){
      move(y,--x);
      ch=inch();
    }

  } else {
    move(y,x-1);

  } 


  delch();
}

Note that I have removed some irrelevant file I/O related code that was in this method.