Highlighting and Selecting text with Python curses

Question

This is my first post to stack overflow. I\'ve been lurking this site for information for years, and it\'s always helpful, so I thought that I would post my first question.

Answer 1

I don't know anything about ncurses, but using Tkinter or one of the other GUI toolkits, it could be done with a canvas. You would first set the scroll region, then bind the "h" key so it sets a highlight variable to True, bind a mouse click to a function that retrieves the location to start, bind the left and right arrows to move left or right one letter, and move the cursor and reverse the colors of the next letter as well as keep track of how many letters you are from the starting point, which also tells you the end location, and bind "y" to copy the text.

It is not as complicated as it might seem as each part is a fairly simple function. All of this would of course depend on the font size, and I would suggest displaying the text with a fixed font so each letter occupies the same width. Once again, I do not know ncurses, but it would be similiar with any toolkit. If you can work it around so that the user can select one entire line with a mouse click, it makes the coding much easier. Post back with some code if you do indeed decide to go with Tkinter or wxPython and want some additional help.