Npyscreen is a python widget library and application framework for programming terminal or console applications. It is built on top of ncurses, which is part of the standard library.

Online documentation can be found at:

http://npyscreen.readthedocs.org/

The library can be downloaded from:

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/npyscreen/

Please note that the official source code repository is at:

https://bitbucket.org/npcole/npyscreen

There is a github repository at:

https://github.com/npcole/npyscreen

for users that prefer github. If possible, though, please file bug reports at the bitbucket repository.

The original source code archive was at:

https://code.google.com/p/npyscreen/

This archive will continue to be updated for as long as code.google.com accepts updates.

This framework should be powerful enough to create everything from quick, simple programs to complex, multi-screen applications. It is designed to make doing the simple tasks very quick and to take much of the pain out of writing larger applications.

There is a very wide variety of default widgets - everything from simple text fields to more complex tree and grid views.

The framework is easy to extend. That said, if you have a requirement for a widget that is not currently included you can try emailing me and I'll see whether I have time to help - no promises!

Please use the Issue Tracker on this page to report bugs and other problems, or to make feature requests.

There is a mailing list at https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/npyscreen/ if you need help getting your application to run.

From version 2.0pre47 onwards all text widgets should now support utf-8 text display and entry on utf-8 capable terminals. This fixes a long-standing limitation with the library, and makes it suitable for use in projects targeting non-English-speaking users.

As of version 2.0pre48, the library aims to be robust in dealing with unicode across all widgets. There are still a few places in the system where support for utf-8/unicode needs further work. Please file bug reports if you encounter them.

The 2.0pre48 release should be considered an alpha-release for version 2.

From version 2.0pre31 onwards this library should work on python 3, though some of the internals have been rewritten. The public api is unchanged, and the new code continues to work on python 2. I am currently still using python 2 for development. All future versions will target both python 2 and 3, unless a feature unique to python 3 becomes vital.

You might also like to look at http://excess.org/urwid/

Compared to npyscreen, urwid is more like a traditional, event-driven gui library, and targets other display devices as well as curses.