Mouse support with ncurses (for python) for large terminals

Question

I'm using python3 with ncurses (curses) inside a docker container. The problem is that mouse events are not accurately reporting x position in terminals that have more than 222 cells width. At first glance this is an obvious limitation because as far as i can see the position is sent in a single byte.

However Midnight Commander accurately handles large terminals. After some digging i could not find how to properly handle mouse with curses (this example does not work properly). Everything i tried with curses failed to work with large terminals. It seems that midnight commander is using gpm, but i could not find any way to use that in python.

q1: How can i handle mouse in large terminals in python3 directly, preferably with curses?

q2: Taking midnight commander as an example, will printing the escape sequences directly in stdout make the mouse work as expected ?

q3: Is there any other terminal gui library that handles mouse properly for python ?

Answer 1

It's not a direct limitation of the python interface to curses, but rather a feature of the underlying curses library, terminal description and the terminal:

• For ncurses, that's the extended mouse feature which is standard in ncurses with ABI 6 (available since 2005, standard in ncurses 6 in 2015), noting that some distributions still provide ABI 5.
• The terminal description has to use a feature which ncurses recognizes as implying the support for SGR 1006, and of course
• The terminal itself has to support that feature (see note in ncurses database from January 2018 pointing out a few of the xterm imitators which do not).