Curses alternative for windows

Question

Is there any alternative of the curses module for python to use in windows? I looked up in the python documentation, but there its mentioned that its for using in unix. I am not much familiar with these, so is there some way to use curses module in windows or is there some similar module specially for windows? [I am using Python 3.3]

Answer 1

Then you're out of luck i'm afraid. There's no real cross-platform version or port of curses/ncurses, there is a "dialogue" port which works, but it's limited in capabilities.

Your best bet is to run CygWin or MinGW32, both are, in "loose terms", a Linux system+terminal emulator which has much of the binaries you need. They can run native Linux/Unix binaries inside the terminal and access your "host" system files at any time, so it's like patching Windows with a kick-ass terminal with all your goodies from the Linux world. You'll still need some basic knowledge of Linux and how the commands etc work, but you'll figure it out.

Here's a Pyglet GUI example:

import pyglet
from pyglet.gl import *

class main (pyglet.window.Window):
    def __init__ (self):
        super(main, self).__init__(800, 600, fullscreen = False)
        self.button_texture = pyglet.image.load('button.png')
        self.button = pyglet.sprite.Sprite(self.button_texture)

        ## --- If you'd like to play sounds:
        #self.sound = pyglet.media.load('music.mp3')
        #self.sound.play()

        self.alive = 1

    def on_draw(self):
        self.render()

    def on_close(self):
        self.alive = 0

    def on_mouse_press(self, x, y, button, modifiers):
        if x > self.button.x and x < (self.button.x + self.button_texture.width):
            if y > self.button.y and y < (self.button.y + self.button_texture.height):
                self.alive = 0

    def on_key_press(self, symbol, modifiers):
        if symbol == 65307: # [ESC]
            self.alive = 0

    def render(self):
        self.clear()
        self.button.draw()
        self.flip()

    def run(self):
        while self.alive == 1:
            self.render()

            # -----------> This is key <----------
            # This is what replaces pyglet.app.run()
            # but is required for the GUI to not freeze
            #
            event = self.dispatch_events()


x = main()
x.run()

Here's the output of that code: