Importing curses on Windows install calls the following:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "C:\Users\user name\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36-32\lib\curses\__init__.py", line 13, in <module>
    from _curses import *
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named '_curses'

Importing curses as "_curses" does the same thing. I have tried the "repair" function and it has not worked.

The curses module is not supported on Windows.

The docs for the curses module say "While curses is most widely used in the Unix environment, versions are available for Windows, DOS, and possibly other systems as well." This is the only mention of platform support I can see.

It might be worth making the platform support explicit in the docs.

Curses is available for Windows from Christopher Gohlke's site: https://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#curses

We should clean up this situation, though, either by making the state of Windows curses support explicit in the docs or by actually adding support for it in the default distribution.

There are two open issues for adding support of the curses module on Windows: issue1005895 and issue2889.

I would much prefer the curses module to be supported in newer versions  since I believe that curses is installed as a built in module (not sure about that).

Anyhow, thank you for your help but I have found a replacement module called "asciimatics" which for fills all the functions that I really need.