Setupterm could not find terminal, in Python program using curses

Question

I am trying to get a simple curses script to run using Python (with PyCharm 2.0).

This is my script:

import curses
stdscr = curses.initscr()
curses.n         


        

Answer 1

If you are using macOS and running PyCharm you will have to set environment variables from the IDE itself, for execution scope.

Edit Configurations -> Environment variables

then add the below name-value pairs

TERM linux

TERMINFO /etc/zsh

The above is equivalent to exporting environment variable from the console which is done like this

$ export TERM=linux
$ export TERMINFO=/bin/zsh

the default for TERM is xterm, other values are [konsole, rxvt] rxvt for example is often built with support for 16 colors. You can try to set TERM to rxvt-16color.

/bin/zsh is path of the terminal application that I use in mac.

It's like telling your program that you will be logging into linux(TERM) like terminal which can be found at /bin/zsh. For using bash shell it could be something like /bin/bash .