On Wed, 28 Jul 2010 09:01:38 -0700, Jonathan Hartley wrote: > 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()') > Curses was originally built on top of termcap, a much simpler and more primitive library. Its abilities are: - read the termcap database to find and load the capability list of the terminal identified as the TERM environment variable. - write a named capability to the screen. If the capability isn't defined for the current terminal its silently ignored. - fill in x, y and write the cursor movement string - thats about it.
Its easy enough to find termcap databases. They're just text files containing a block of attribute values for each terminal, normally including ANSI terminals, Linux consoles, X-terms etc. They are also fairly easy to parse, even in vanilla C, so parsing one on Python should be a breeze. Termcap format specs and lists of standard attribute names are easy enough to find too. IOW, if you extend colorama to read its codes from a termcap database you'll have a basic but easily portable character console handler that can at least clear the screen, move the cursor and, if the screen has the capability, change the colour of characters or make them bold/dim/blink etc. To give you an idea of how complex this is, I've re-implemented termcap in Java for my own purposes. It amounts to 1100 lines of fairly well spaced and commented Java or about 340 statements, which were estimated by counting lines containing semicolons. -- martin@ | Martin Gregorie gregorie. | Essex, UK org | -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
