Question

I have code that looks like this:

stdscr.nodelay(1)
while True:
    c = stdscr.getch()
    if c != -1:
        stdscr.addstr("%s was pressed\n" % c)
    if time() - last > 1:
        stdscr.addstr("time() == %s\n" % str(time()))
        last = time()

However, I’m worried that my code is really wasteful/inefficient. Is there a callback mechanism available for curses? If not, what would be the canonical way to handle this kind of situation?

Answer 1

You could try Urwid instead.

Urwid provides a higher-level toolkit on top of curses and includes an event loop to handle keyboard and mouse input. It either uses it’s own select-based event loop, or can hook into gevent or Twisted.

In addition to handling keyboard input efficiently you’ll also have a host of options to handle user input with edit boxes, list controls and more.