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

[Jonathan Hartley]

On Jul 28, 5:47 pm, Thomas Jollans <tho... at jollans.com> wrote:
> 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 uponhttp://adamv.com/dev/python/curses/-- this
> is probably the only reasonable way to get a useful curses API on
> Windows: forget the DOS box.



> ncurses ... is written in C, not
> Python, so it doesn't use Python's sys.stdout object to do I/O.

Ah, I should have spotted that. Of course. Thanks for the
enlightenment.

And Neil Cerutti, I think I'll just email the whole source tree to
myself, and have a script that scans my inbox, unzips source trees and
runs their tests. Much nicer. :-)