First, we will deal with spammers. You do not have permission to store this email in a public space unless my email address is expunged. I am learning Python, and my references are Mark Summerfield's book on Python 3.0 and what I can find on the Internet. I know little C, and have no prior experience of curses. I do remember Turbo Pascal, with Turbo Vision, fondly, it allowed one to write text-based applications with hot keys, buttons, menus etc, and all with the use of the mouse. I am finding the documentation I find (when google turns up the right release - it tends to find earlier releases, even at python.org) is incomplete and/or lacks clarity regarding the use of the mouse. I am using Python 3.1 on Debian Still In Development, on a Linux console and but for my wish to use the mouse, it would be in screen. I'm also using gpm. There might be room for argument as to whether any of these problems might be to do with the python/curses rather than its documentation. Here is the reference document: http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/curses.html The first problems I had is that, when I enabled the mouse using curses.mousemask(), I could not see what mask to use so I tried -1. This did not work, so I hunted further and eventually hit upon ALL_MOUSE_EVENTS. That didn't work differently. What happened is that my first getch() returned curses.KEY_MOUSE. When I used curses.getmouse() to find what happened, it raised an exception. I don't know what exception it raised, so I cannot selectively catch it. It might be curses.error, I hit on that after reading some source code (really!) and guessing. Anyway, that's what I'm catching. The error message being returned is ERR. I don't have the foggiest idea what that means (except something didn't work), and the documentation does not help me resolve the problem. Eventually, I tried it directly on a console and discovered, on a Linux console, it works. For diagnostic purposes, connected to localhost using ssh. It doesn't work through ssh either. I then tried to find a method to see whether I have a working mouse (curses.has_mouse() perhaps?) The crude hack I implemented is to, first, enable mouse events as above, and then if that errors, I disable them again. I would like to see the documentation updated to reflect the circumstances where curses' mouse support does not work, and the recommended way to discover whether there is a functional mouse at all. Had getch() not returned KEY_MOUSE, I would hardly have been better off, I would have clicked the mouse and had nothing happen. Which leads me to the next problem. Having sorted that our, and having debugging messages popping out whenever I clicked the mouse, I set about creating some code to distinguish mouse events. Of course, the first thing I wanted was code that would correctly identify when I clicked a button, and which one it was. The first part is easy, in fact, I already had that working. The second part was not. I printed out, in hex, the button state, but with no documentation that I could find, it was difficult matching the values I saw printed with the names in the web page. I clicked the mouse buttons, repeatedly, and saw the events being reported by my debugging code. However, the names I found, such as BUTTON1_CLICKED did not match what I saw with my eyes. More debugging code, and I find matches with PRESS and RELEASE. Never a CLICK. This behaviour needs to be documented, as does the question of how it works in, say, xterm. Is it different? I don't have X installed on Sid, nor python3 on anything that has. The binary values of the constants' names also need to be documented; if they vary between platforms (I think I read that they do), then in the packaged documentation. I also had some difficulty with curses windows on my Linux console. I discovered there were some things I needed to do before I could define a scrollable area or scroll the screen. I am not sure that all of the things I did are necessary. I would like to see the page improved with examples of the calls needed to prepare a screen for curses, for creating windows, for scrolling areas of the windows, and of the use of the mouse. I don't propose turning the page into a tutorial, just some basic examples (similar to those in the man pages for mawk and gawk) would have saved me hours of time and frustration. -- John Summerfield