On Wednesday, October 21, 2015 at 11:26:40 PM UTC+1, eryksun wrote:
> 
> Also check out the curses module that's available on Christoph Gohlke's site:
> 
>     http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#curses

Neat.  I wasn't aware of this library of wheel installations.  I'll have a look 
at how that works out and see if I can rationalize my mapping code.  

First impression is that this might be tricky, though, as I've had issues with 
older Linux distributions using ncurses 5 and so handling 256 colour modes has 
been difficult due to limits on colour pairs.  This meant I had to fall back to 
looking up and using codes in the terminfo database using tigetstr.  According 
to the PDcurses docs, these APIs are all just stubs that return an error and so 
I'll probably need a curses and PDcurses mapping layer from the looks of things 
- which is not much better than a curses and win32 mapping layer.

I'm also still not convinced that curses package is the right API to expose for 
Python.  While ncurses does a great job of abstracting away the issues of 
terminal inter-operation, the Python curses package is just a thin wrapper of 
that C library and, as can be seen above, not truly cross-platform due to the 
restrictions of PDcurses.

Shouldn't we have a higher level simplification?  Something that hides away all 
the complexity of handling all these different platforms and so exposes a 
simple API?  One that humans can use without worrying about these issues?
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