//Note! Don't feel obliged to answer this question, as some looking around by me (and a good referral by XLambda, Corremn, and Dephbokks) have led me to nCurses, where I found the answer to my question (by using nCurses) in about 10 seconds. I'll leave my original post up so you can laugh at my stupidity
So I'm feeling very, very stupid right now. I'm using libtcod with C, and I'm currently trying to get a simple @ moving across the screen program, but I can't figure out how to tell the computer to make a GUI. I can get it to do plenty of stuff in the console, but I can't get it to open a GUI. I feel like I'm missing a tiny little thing, like a snippet of code that I can't find. I've google'd all over the place, but I can't find anything. Any help?