What is curses?¶

The curses library supplies a terminal-independent screen-painting andkeyboard-handling facility for text-based terminals; such terminalsinclude VT100s, the Linux console, and the simulated terminal providedby various programs. Display terminals support various control codesto perform common operations such as moving the cursor, scrolling thescreen, and erasing areas. Different terminals use widely differingcodes, and often have their own minor quirks.

1. So the basic idea behind a single NCurses GUI thead is, there is only one consumer thread, but there may be many producer threads. Central to the design is a shared, thread-safe Action queue. Any thread may produce an Action and post it to this queue for later execution (like a functor or a callback).
2. Revised by: ppadala. Added 'a word about window' section, Added scanwexample. This document is intended to be an 'All in One' guide for programming with ncurses and its sister libraries. We graduate from a simple 'Hello World' program to more complex form manipulation. No prior experience in ncurses is assumed.

The ncurses library routines give the user a terminal-independent method of updating character screens with reasonable optimization. This implementation is 'new curses' (ncurses) and is the approved replacement for 4.4BSD classic curses, which has been discontinued.

In a world of graphical displays, one might ask “why bother”? It’strue that character-cell display terminals are an obsolete technology,but there are niches in which being able to do fancy things with themare still valuable. One niche is on small-footprint or embeddedUnixes that don’t run an X server. Another is tools such as OSinstallers and kernel configurators that may have to run before anygraphical support is available.

The curses library provides fairly basic functionality, providing theprogrammer with an abstraction of a display containing multiplenon-overlapping windows of text. The contents of a window can bechanged in various ways—adding text, erasing it, changing itsappearance—and the curses library will figure out what control codesneed to be sent to the terminal to produce the right output. cursesdoesn’t provide many user-interface concepts such as buttons, checkboxes,or dialogs; if you need such features, consider a user interface library such asUrwid.

The curses library was originally written for BSD Unix; the later System Vversions of Unix from AT&T added many enhancements and new functions. BSD cursesis no longer maintained, having been replaced by ncurses, which is anopen-source implementation of the AT&T interface. If you’re using anopen-source Unix such as Linux or FreeBSD, your system almost certainly usesncurses. Since most current commercial Unix versions are based on System Vcode, all the functions described here will probably be available. The olderversions of curses carried by some proprietary Unixes may not supporteverything, though.

The Windows version of Python doesn’t include the cursesmodule. A ported version called UniCurses is available. You couldalso try the Console modulewritten by Fredrik Lundh, which doesn’tuse the same API as curses but provides cursor-addressable text outputand full support for mouse and keyboard input.

The Python curses module¶

The Python module is a fairly simple wrapper over the C functions provided bycurses; if you’re already familiar with curses programming in C, it’s reallyeasy to transfer that knowledge to Python. The biggest difference is that thePython interface makes things simpler by merging different C functions such asaddstr(), mvaddstr(), and mvwaddstr() into a singleaddstr() method. You’ll see this covered in moredetail later.

This HOWTO is an introduction to writing text-mode programs with cursesand Python. It doesn’t attempt to be a complete guide to the curses API; forthat, see the Python library guide’s section on ncurses, and the C manual pagesfor ncurses. It will, however, give you the basic ideas.

Last updated on AUGUST 03, 2021

Applies to:

Goal

The library required for Autosys installation is missing on the BDA. For example, the following is seen:

Ncurses Library Online

When checking the BDA cluster from node 1 the following is found for example on cluster with Mammoth 4.2.0 the following 64-bit libraries exist:

[root@<HOSTNAME1> ~]# rpm -qa | grep ncurses

ncurses-libs-5.7-3.20090208.el6.x86_64

ncurses-base-5.7-3.20090208.el6.x86_64

ncurses-devel-5.7-3.20090208.el6.x86_64

ncurses-5.7-3.20090208.el6.x86_64

No Curses Or Ncurses Library On This System

Where can the 32-bit version be found?

Solution

Ncurses Library

Ncurses Library Ubuntu

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