I'm writing an application for Windows 10 to display and update text at specific locations in a Windows console window. The program is launched by a command in the console window. Upon launch, it erases the window's previous contents, then displays its output, updating as it goes, until completion. Upon exit, it should leave the displayed output in place, and a new command prompt should appear below. Launch, display, and subsequent command prompt all occur in the same console window. (Old school, I know, but that's the requirement.) The program is written in C and uses calls to the PDcurses library to control cursor placement and to output display text to the screen. The application is built with GCC/MinGW on a Windows 10 platform.
Everything works until the application exits, but then the display output disappears and the previous window contents (from before the app was launched) reappear. From what I can tell, this seems to be the default behavior for curses, possibly due to the way it handles screen buffering.
I'm looking for ways to override this behavior, but I'm not sure how to approach it. Can I direct PDcurses to write to the standard screen buffer rather than the alternate screen buffer (if that's what's going on)? If so, how? Should I copy the contents of the screen buffer before I call endwin(), then copy those contents back to the screen buffer afterward? Again, how? I'm sure this problem has already been solved, probably many times, but I haven't found any solutions that seem to apply to a C executable running in a Windows console, and I have only limited experience with PDcurses and the Windows API library. Any help would be appreciated.
The official way to do it is to set an environment variable: set PDC_RESTORE_SCREEN=0. You can combine this with set PDC_PRESERVE_SCREEN=Y to prevent PDCurses from clearing the screen at startup.