Python ncurses, CDK, urwid difference

Question

What's the difference between these 3? As far as I understand it they both provide binding to curses which is the C library for terminal text-based UI.

I currently have no knowledge of any of the 3 and I've never used curses. Which one would you recommend? I've heard of ncurses many times but only once or twice about CDK (through research) and never heard of urwid (I think).

Solution 1

What I get after looking at some references is:

• ncurses: It's a free software version of curses, so you have to deal with all kind low-level details.
• pyCDK: It's a higher level library that provides some widgets. I haven't used this one, but according to the sourceforge project page it's been unmaintained for a long time (at least the python binding), so I wouldn't go with this one.
• urwid: I've used this one and I've to say it's still a little bit low level (it's more a framework than a widget library), but still quite useful and much user-friendlier than curses. As a UI framework it has all the stuff you'd typically expect like widgets, events and a way to control the layout of the widgets. Some things that I'd say are hard with curses, but are easy with urwid are: redraw your widgets when the terminal is resized and gather mouse input (clicking on a button, for example).

So my recommendation would be to use urwid and if it doesn't meet your needs look for other alternatives.

Solution 2

I haven't used any of the libraries, but I'm assuming that you're referring to:

• Python's built-in curses module
• pycdk, a Python interface to CDK
• The urwid console UI library

They're just different libraries with the same goal: provide an API for a console-based UI. From a previous question, it seems that curses requires more low-level boilerplate. One thing to note is that Python's curses module is only available under Unix; if you're on Windows, you may want to look at the Console module written by Fredrik Lundh.

Both of the other choices seem promising as well, although urwid looks to be more organized as far as development goes, and is still being actively developed somewhat.

Comments

[Vucar Timnärakrul]

Also, Urwid handles Unicode input gracefully, which many other console APIs don’t.

[Trevor Boyd Smith]

I've used a couple of widget-toolkits like C++ Qt4, Java Swing/AWT, C# .Net, python tk... all of these have in common: a library of widgets, containers to hold other widgets, layouts, event loop/async mechanism. The python included curses does not have what I would call the basics that I want/need (library of widgets, containers, layouts, event loop mechanism). ||| urwid on the other hand does have the basics (library of widgets, layouts, event loop mechanism). And has very good examples, tutorial, documentation so that you get going quickly.