The curses library supplies a terminal-independent screen-painting and keyboard-handling facility for text-based terminals; such terminals include VT100s, the Linux console, and the simulated terminal provided by various programs. Display terminals support various control codes to perform common operations such as moving the cursor, scrolling the screen, and erasing areas. Different terminals use widely differing codes, and often have their own minor quirks. In a world of graphical displays, one might ask “why bother”? It’s true that character-cell display terminals are an obsolete technology, but there are niches in which being able to do fancy things with them are still valuable. One niche is on small-footprint or embedded Unixes that don’t run an X server. Another is tools such as OS installers and kernel configurators that may have to run before any graphical support is available. The curses library provides fairly basic functionality, providing the programmer with an abstraction of a display containing multiple non-overlapping windows of text. The contents of a window can be changed in various ways—adding text, erasing it, changing its appearance—and the curses library will figure out what control codes need to be sent to the terminal to produce the right output. curses doesn’t provide many user-interface concepts such as buttons, checkboxes, or dialogs; if you need such features, consider a user interface library such as Urwid. The curses library was originally written for BSD Unix; the later System V versions of Unix from AT&T added many enhancements and new functions. BSD curses is no longer maintained, having been replaced by ncurses, which is an open-source implementation of the AT&T interface. If you’re using an open-source Unix such as Linux or FreeBSD, your system almost certainly uses ncurses. Since most current commercial Unix versions are based on System V code, all the functions described here will probably be available. The older versions of curses carried by some proprietary Unixes may not support everything, though. The Windows version of Python doesn’t include the curses module. A ported version called UniCurses is available. You could also try the Console module written by Fredrik Lundh, which doesn’t use the same API as curses but provides cursor-addressable text output and full support for mouse and keyboard input.