python curses terminal settings changed

Question

I'm pretty new to curses but I wrote a working little curses application. But after a while I noticed that my default terminal settings were changed during the session. The background color is a solid black, but I've configured a transparent terminal. Also the color looks more like white than grey. My code, but I'm sure it's not related to the problem. I'm using debian wheezy with python 2.7.2 ``` #!/usr/bin/env python import curses class Monitor: def __init__(self, screen): self.screen = screen self.height, self.width = self.screen.getmaxyx() self.screen.nodelay(1) def redraw(self): self.screen.clear() self.screen.addstr(1, 1, 'hai') self.screen.refresh() def main(self): while 1: key = self.screen.getch() if key == ord('q'): break self.redraw() def main(stdscr): mon = Monitor(stdscr) mon.main() if __name__ == '__main__': try: curses.wrapper(main) except KeyboardInterrupt: pass ```

Accepted Answer

I figured I should answer this, since I've been looking for this before.

In `main()`, you need to add

`curses.use_default_colors()`

This will use your terminal's colors instead of curses' overwriting them. This means that the background color will be transparent if no background color is set.

If, later, you want to create a color pair with a transparent background, instead of for example

`curses.init_pair(1, curses.COLOR_WHITE, curses.COLOR_BLACK)`

use

`curses.init_pair(1, curses.WHITE, -1)`

This will use the default background, i.e. transparent.

python curses terminal settings changed

Solution

Problem