[Tutor] Windows Programs vs. Text-Cell Graphics

[Remco Gerlich]

On Mon, Mar 26, 2001 at 07:58:59AM -0900, Tim Johnson wrote:
> On the linux side, Midnight Command and Nftp are good
> examples of this approach. 
> 
> Windows side there is Ztree, which is one of the best all-around
> applications ever written, IMHO.
> 
> Several years ago, I was asked by a construction firm to write an
> estimator program. My client did not want the application
> to be "mouse enabled" at all. He did want maximum speed and
> something like a gui interface.
> The result was written in C and very fast even on a 486/100.
> Personally, I think it would be great to see an API in python 
> to such an effect.
> 
> Awful busy right now, but here's my question:
> Is there anything like this available to python?
> 
> If not, how does one write a color/character pair to video memory
> in python? That is where it starts.

Ncurses. Curses (and ncurses, "new curses") is a library for putting text on
some place on a terminal (or screen). Writing directly to video memory is
silly, this is not the 80s... Curses is cross platform, works over Telnet,
etc.

You can build a Unix Python with curses easily (it's standard on Unix I
think) but it might be a little more work to get it for Windows (but still
not hard).

Midnight Commander also uses ncurses, I think. The game 'rogue' was
developed by the same authors as curses, and they added features to rogue
that used new curses features, and they added things to curses as the game
needed them... creating a whole genre of cool games leading up to NetHack,
ZAngband, et cetera.

-- 
Remco Gerlich