The Invent with Python Blog

Writings from the author of Automate the Boring Stuff.

Pygcurse - A "curses" Emulator Built on Pygame

Sat 10 September 2011    Al Sweigart

Pygcurse logo

Pygcurse (pronounced "pig curse") is a curses library emulator that runs on top of the Pygame framework. It provides an easy way to create text adventures, roguelikes, and console-style applications. The mascot of Pygcurse is a blue pig with a skull tattoo on its butt.

Download Pygcurse and Demo Programs.

Read the Pygcurse tutorial.

View the Pygcurse homepage.

Pygcurse provides several benefits over normal text-based stdio programs:

  1. Color text and background.
  2. The ability to move the cursor and print text anywhere in the console window.
  3. The ability to make console apps that make use of the mouse.
  4. The ability to have programs respond to individual key presses, instead of waiting for the user to type an entire string and press enter (as is the case with input()/raw_input()).
  5. The ability to use any font and any character in those fonts.
  6. Since the console window that Pygcurse uses is just a Pygame surface object, additional drawing and transformations can be applied to it. Multiple surfaces can also be used in the same program.

Pygcurse also provides some additional features that curses normally doesn't, such as tinting, shadows, textboxes, and line drawing functions.

Pygcurse requires Pygame to be installed. Pygame can be downloaded from http://pygame.org. Pygcurse can be used with either Python 2 or Python 3.


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