Trying to write a program a la `man` in ncurses and just, is this hell?

I just want a floating header, a scrollable main body that reads from a file, and a command line footer, why is that so difficult? I finally got it to handle resizing terminals but now I need to try to compile it for windows, which does have unofficial ports of ncurses, but I have no idea how to use them.

Should I just restrict the windows version to a non-interactive command instead of a TUI like I want?