Is there a good reason why you're using a subwindow? If you create a new top-level window then the code works correctly - simply change stdscr.subwin
to curses.newwin
and it works as you'd expect.
I'm not a curses expert, but I believe a subwindow shares the character buffer with its parent such that changes to either one will also affect the other. So, if you're looking to sub-divide a window into logical areas (perhaps a menu bar, main area and status bar) then subwindows are useful. If, however, you're looking for something more like a dialog box or pop-up menu then a whole new window (with its own separate buffer) is what you're after.
I can't find any definitive reference for ncurses which agrees or disagrees with me, but man page for AIX seems to corroborate it:
Recall that the subwindow shares its parent's window buffer. Changes made to the shared window buffer in the area covered by a subwindow, through either the parent window or any of its subwindows, affects all windows sharing the window buffer.
Of course, this isn't definitive for ncurses, but I can't find anything to the contrary and it certainly seems to explain the behaviour observed. I also did a crude experiment where, immediately after the subwin.getch()
line in your example, I added this line:
raise Exception(stdscr.instr(20, 15, 3))
In your example, I get JJJ
as the content of the actual main window. If I change to use curses.newwin()
to create the window instead of stdscr.subwin()
I get the expected MMM
.
I don't know how many specific Python curses resources there are, but most of the standard tutorials and documents about ncurses are quite useful for this sort of level. Back when I had to do some work in it, this document was quite useful. If you scroll down to the "An Example" section, you'll see that the menu pop-ups are not subwindows - he alludes to this with the following slightly vague explanation:
We don't want this new window to overwrite previously written characters on the background. They should stay there after the menu closes. This is why the menu window can't be created as a subwindow of stdscr.
Also, I remember that using both stdscr
and your own windows can cause issues - the "official" ncurses introduction has some warnings about this sort of thing. It also suggests avoiding overlapping windows entirely, as they're apparently error-prone, but I don't recall having any issues with them for short-term transient modal dialogs (which is the only use to which I put them). Of course, just because my simple use-case didn't expose any issues doesn't mean there aren't any. In something as complicated as ncurses, however, I can see the wisdom in keeping things as simple as you can.
I hope that's some help. As I said, I'm by no means a curses expert, but hopefully this gets you a few steps further along.