term 2.2

An enhanced version of the tty module

Overview

The term package is an enhanced version of the standard library’s tty module. It provides context managers for temporarily switching the terminal to raw or cbreak mode and allows to retrieve the cursor position without having to resort to curses.

Package Contents

setraw(fd, when=TCSAFLUSH, min=1, time=0)

Put the terminal in raw mode.

setcbreak(fd, when=TCSAFLUSH, min=1, time=0)

Put the terminal in cbreak mode.

rawmode(fd, when=TCSAFLUSH, min=1, time=0)

Context manager to put the terminal in raw mode.

cbreakmode(fd, when=TCSAFLUSH, min=1, time=0)

Context manager to put the terminal in cbreak mode.

opentty(bufsize=1)

Context manager returning an rw stream connected to /dev/tty. The stream is None if the device could not be opened.

getyx()

Return the cursor position as 1-based (line, col) tuple. Line and col are 0 if the terminal does not support DSR 6.

Examples

To resize the terminal window, we enter cbreak mode and write the new dimensions to the tty:

from term import opentty, cbreakmode

with opentty() as tty:
    if tty is not None:
        with cbreakmode(tty, min=0):
            tty.write('\033[8;25;80t');

print 'terminal resized'

You may also want to look at the source code of getyx().

Caveat

The terminal must be in canonical mode before any of the functions and context managers can be used. They are not meant for switching between e.g. raw and cbreak modes. Nesting context managers of the same type is allowed though.

Changelog

2.2 - 2017-02-05

• Support Python 2.6-3.6 without 2to3. [stefan]

2.1 - 2014-04-19

• Remove setuptools from install_requires because it isn’t. [stefan]

2.0 - 2012-04-27

• Open /dev/tty in binary mode under Python 3. [stefan]

• Disable buffering if the device is not seekable. [stefan]

• Remove getmaxyx since it cannot be implemented reliably. [stefan]

• Support Python 2.5. [stefan]

• Change license to GPL or PSF to avoid relicensing of PSF code. [stefan]

1.0 - 2012-04-11

• Initial release. [stefan]