6.15 curses -- Terminal handling for character-cell displays

Changed in version 1.6: Added support for the ncurses library and converted to a package.

The curses module provides an interface to the curses library, the de-facto standard for portable advanced terminal handling.

While curses is most widely used in the Unix environment, versions are available for DOS, OS/2, and possibly other systems as well. This extension module is designed to match the API of ncurses, an open-source curses library hosted on Linux and the BSD variants of Unix.

See Also:

Module curses.ascii:: Utilities for working with ASCII characters, regardless of your locale settings.

Module curses.panel:: A panel stack extension that adds depth to curses windows.

Module curses.textpad:: Editable text widget for curses supporting Emacs-like bindings.

Module curses.wrapper:: Convenience function to ensure proper terminal setup and resetting on application entry and exit.

Curses Programming with Python: Tutorial material on using curses with Python, by Andrew Kuchling and Eric Raymond, is available on the Python Web site.

The Demo/curses/ directory in the Python source distribution contains some example programs using the curses bindings provided by this module.