completely without shell scripts and autotools, just using native zig host tools and awk.

to compile:

zig build

the c and data files in src are copied from an autotools build on ubuntu amd64... most of them use awk to process the capability data files, maybe those tools should become zig build steps.

that is a custom build step, a copy of zig's ConfigHeader step but without the generated by comment, to allow it to template an awk script used by the ncurses build system.