Curses is a library of useful text terminal screen manipulation primitives like "scroll this rectangle upward" or "fill this rectangle with blue."

In turn, the curses features depend on intimately knowing the special character sequences you can send to the terminal to implement these results. Terminal sequences are usually somewhat simpler: "adopt a new text color" for subsequent output, "move the cursor" to a given location.

On Unix systems, it's likely going to rely on the Termcap library to get a series of escape character sequences. On DOS-based systems, it probably assumes that since Termcap doesn't exist, it should rely on ANSI escape character sequences. DOS used to offer an optional ANSI.SYS device driver that would recognize and implement the terminal features.

The perl module you've installed implements Curses features. It is probably spitting out ANSI sequences. Of course, if you don't have any ANSI.SYS (or equivalent) installed, it looks really noisy. The cursor doesn't get moved, the screen areas don't get colored, the sequences overwrite each other and the rest of the program output.

You need an ANSI.SYS sort of driver loaded. Google is your friend.

--
[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]

In reply to Re: curses on win32 by halley
in thread curses on win32 by primus

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.