Why is there no platform independent way of clearing a terminal?

[Thomas Jollans]

On 07/28/2010 06:01 PM, Jonathan Hartley wrote:
> 
> Oh, plus, while we're on this subject:
> 
> Am I right that curses in Python stdlib doesn't work on Windows, and
> there is currently no simple way to fix this?
> 
> Also, is it crazy to imagine that if colorama was pushed through to
> completion (ie. to support a majority of the relevant ANSI codes) then
> Python's stdlib curses module, unmodified, would suddenly just work on
> Windows? (after a call to 'colorama.init()')
> 
> I presume these ideas are oversimplifications or just plain wrong. If
> anyone would care to correct my misunderstandings, I'd be very
> grateful.

Correct: it's not THAT simple.

Python's curses module is a (I'm not sure how thin) wrapper around the
good old UNIX curses (ncurses, ...) library. This is written in C, not
Python, so it doesn't use Python's sys.stdout object to do I/O.

I haven't had a look at colorama, but it sounds like it hooks into
sys.stdout, or Python file objects anyway. Far, far above the layer
curses does I/O on. So, if you ported a normal curses library to
Windows, colorama wouldn't help you a bit.

It might be possible to write a curses-compatible library that works
with cmd.exe. Maybe. But, even if it's possible, I don't think it's
easy, and I especially don't think it would be particularly rewarding.

Also, I just stumbled upon http://adamv.com/dev/python/curses/ -- this
is probably the only reasonable way to get a useful curses API on
Windows: forget the DOS box.