(n)curses or tcl/tk?

[magnate]

Hi All,

Just learning Python - my first new language for about 18 years (I'm
not a programmer ...). I'm writing a small utility to manipulate some
text files (for the game VGA Planets, if you're interested: http://
www.phost.de). It's currently working, but it looks a bit ugly with
raw_input and just basic text output.

I have plans to expand the functions of the utility, and I want a
simple GUI frontend. I assumed I'd end up with something that looks a
bit like the Debian installer: a curses-driven thing with simple ascii
boxes and buttons. But reading a bit more about Python makes me think
that support for tcl/tk is much more developed than support for
curses.

So my question is, should I go to the trouble of learning how to make
boxes and stuff using tcl/tk, or just go with ncurses as I imagined?

Which is more portable? The basic idea is that this just runs on the
largest possible variety of systems (er, assuming they have Python
installed, of course). I use Debian mostly, but of course it needs to
run on bog-standard Windows boxes. Does that tilt the balance in
favour of curses or tcl/tk? Or should I just stick with ugly text?

Thanks for all your help,

CC (noob)

 

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Ma=EBl_Benjamin_Mettler?=]

As far as I know Windows does not support ncurses natively (using CygWin
probably changes that). So go with Tkinter. Looks crappy but at least it
should run on all major platforms...

 

[Ido Yehieli]

So my question is, should I go to the trouble of learning how to make
boxes and stuff using tcl/tk, or just go with ncurses as I imagined?

If you want to use curses on windows with python you need to install
WCurses first.
Other then that it is very portable.

After you get used to it curses is also quite easy to use, however tk
has a more features.

Depends on what you want to do. I would have used curses in your
position because it is easy to use (although tk is no rocket science
either) and I like apps that can run on a terminal emulator.

Ido.