Screen Control in WinXP and Linux

[peter]

I've been wrestling on and off with this problem for over a year now,
without success. Basically, I am looking for a simple set of screen
and keyboard manipulation commands that will run identically under
Linux and Windows. Nothing fancy - just clear the screen, print a
string at an arbitrary xy position and detect a keystroke. I've
googled around this newsgroup and elsewhere, and come across various
suggestions (and even posted my own partial solutions), but still
haven't come up with an elegant solution.

My latest attempt is a throw back to the 1980's, using ANSI control
codes. Seems to work on Linux, but not under Windows XP. I've found
references to an application called ansi.com (didn't work), and
instructions to modify the config.nt file to include

dosonly
device=%SystemRoot%\system32\ansi.sys

then run command.com. I thought I was there - I could echo control
codes satisfactorily, then when I tried to run python got an error
message 'This program cannot be run in DOS mode'.

Why is something which is apparently so simple such a hurdle? Other
cross platform languages (euphoria, yabasic) seem to manage it. I
don't have the expertise to write the code myself, but surely for the
gurus this is not difficult.

Any ideas? How can I run ansi.sys in WindowsXP. Can anyone come up
with module with locate(), cls() and getch() functions? Is there any
point in searching further?

I realise this may come across as a bit petulant - not intended, but I
am genuinely perplexed as to why this is such a show stopper.

Peter

 

[Gabriel Genellina]

I've been wrestling on and off with this problem for over a year now,
without success. Basically, I am looking for a simple set of screen
and keyboard manipulation commands that will run identically under
Linux and Windows. Nothing fancy - just clear the screen, print a
string at an arbitrary xy position and detect a keystroke. I've
googled around this newsgroup and elsewhere, and come across various
suggestions (and even posted my own partial solutions), but still
haven't come up with an elegant solution.

What about curses (Linux) and Console (XP)? You could wrap just the bits
needed for your application in a more-or-less generic way.

 

[Tim Golden]

I've been wrestling on and off with this problem for over a year now,
without success. Basically, I am looking for a simple set of screen
and keyboard manipulation commands that will run identically under
Linux and Windows. Nothing fancy - just clear the screen, print a
string at an arbitrary xy position and detect a keystroke. I've
googled around this newsgroup and elsewhere, and come across various
suggestions (and even posted my own partial solutions), but still
haven't come up with an elegant solution.

OK, a bit of info from the Windows side of
things. Here are several existing modules
which offer the kind of thing you're after
in different ways. Don't bother with the
ANSI thing; it's a dead end under Windows.

http://newcenturycomputers.net/projects/wconio.html
http://effbot.org/zone/console-index.htm
http://adamv.com/dev/python/curses/

I've used the first two for relatively trivial
things, the third not at all. The third is
interesting, obviously, because curses is
readily available on Linux (indeed comes as
part of Python, I think). So that might be
a quick win.

Alternatively, and depending on your needs,
there are a few UI addons for pygame:

http://www.pygame.org/projects/9

Might not be what you're after from your
original description, but better too much
information than too little.

Obviously, unless the curses stuff fits your
needs, you might need to write a wrapper module
doing a bit of conditional importing or
platform-sniffing, but that's not beyond the wit
of man.

TJG

 

[peter]

Thanks for these replies. Clearly what I'm looking for does not exist
- yet!

I've started by looking at Frederik Lundh's Console module. It looks
promising, although on basis of ten minutes experience I can't yet
figure out how to use it properly. Perhaps I should study Frederik's
examples ....

Peter