Save and restore terminal window conent using Curses for Python

I'm making some console app on Python with Curses (window-curses) library. At some point I need to save window state (or maybe whole terminal state) to some object/variable and restore it in future. What's the proper way to do this?

I found methods in module documentaion which do this via saving state to the file. But maybe there exists some other way to do this in memory.

As you found, you can use things like the putwin function to save a pad to a file and getwin to restore it from a file. If you want to keep this in memory, rather than a file on disk, you can use a BytesIO object in place of a real file handle.

import io
import curses
curses.initscr()
pad = curses.newpad(100, 100)
# ... do things with the pad

# save the pad in memory
f = io.BytesIO()
pad.putwin(f)


# later recall the data
f.seek(0)  # reset the cursor to the beginning of the "file"
pad.getwin(f)

You could also write some functions to describe this another way:

def save_win(win) -> bytes:
    f = io.BytesIO()
    win.putwin(f)
    bytes_data = f.getvalue()
    return bytes_data


def load_win(bytes_data: bytes) -> curses.window:
    f = io.BytesIO(bytes_data)
    f.seek(0)
    return curses.getwin(f)