'normal' shell with curses

[Michael Goerz]

Thynnus wrote, on 03/04/2008 08:48 AM:
> On 3/3/2008 9:57 PM, Michael Goerz wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm trying to print out text in color. As far as I know, curses is the 
>> only way to do that (or not?). So, what I ultimately want is a curses 
>> terminal that behaves as closely as possible as a normal terminal, 
>> i.e. it breaks lines and scrolls automatically, so that I can 
>> implement a function myprint(color, text) that does what print() does, 
>> only in color.
> 
> You might find the below helpful. Let us know how you make out?
> 
> --------
> 
> Python Cookbook
>  http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/475116
> 
> Title:
>  Using terminfo for portable color output & cursor control
> 
> Description:
> The curses module defines several functions (based on terminfo) that can 
> be used to perform lightweight cursor control & output formatting 
> (color, bold, etc). These can be used without invoking curses mode 
> (curses.initwin) or using any of the more heavy-weight curses 
> functionality. This recipe defines a TerminalController class, which can 
> make portable output formatting very simple. Formatting modes that are 
> not supported by the terminal are simply omitted.
> 
> --------
> 

That looks *extremely* interesting. From a very brief test, it seems to 
do exactly what I want!

Now, Windows seems very problematic for color output. I was using the 
following as a test, based on the above recipe:

term = TerminalController()
while True:
     print term.render('${YELLOW}Warning:${NORMAL}'), 'paper is crinkled'
     print term.render('${RED}Error:${NORMAL}'), 'paper is ripped'

On Linux, it works fine, on Windows, it just prints white on black 
(which is of course what it should do if the terminal doesn't support 
color). Can anyone get the Windows cmd.exe terminal to do color? I 
already tried to add device=%SystemRoot%\system32\ansi.sys to config.nt, 
but that doesn't seem to do anything (neither in what I tried yesterday 
with the ANSI escape codes, nor with the recipe code now). I also very 
briefly tried running it on the winbash shell 
(http://win-bash.sourceforge.net/), it didn't have any color either... 
So, any way to get color in Windows?

Michael