Replacing curses

[Ian Ward]

Ross Ridge wrote:
> In general it's impossible to know how many display positions some
> random Unicode character might use.  For example, Chinese characters
> normally take two display positions, but the terminal your using might
> not support them and display a single width replacement character.
> Hopefully, you're limitted in the character set you actually need to
> support and the terminals that your applicaiton will be using.

I'm not so lucky -- I'm writing a console UI library (Urwid) that anyone 
could use, and I'm trying to support as many encodings and terminals as 
possible.

I hope that the different terminal behaviors can be enumerated so that 
the console interface will degrade gracefully with less capable 
terminals.  The mined_2000 unicode text editor is a program that does 
this by detecting the terminal's behavior on startup. I'll probably take 
a similar approach.

Ian Ward