This patch is a huge improvement over the current situation, which is we don't have a cross-platform curses implementation in the standard library.

The alternatives listed by Mark aren't sufficient. For the two reasons given below:

- The implementation at http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#curses does not support unicode characters, which is a big limitation in today's general computing tasks.

- The UniCurses module isn't compatible with the curses standard lib implementation since it wraps curses/pdcurses and does not provide python own wrappers like the ability of addstr to accept encoded byte strings. This essentially makes UniCurses a 3rd-party library requirements regardless of the operating system, which is always nice to have but does not help the batteries included principles behind python standard library.

Conclusion:
Please implement this patch ASAP. It's been many years since it was made available. It works, it passes all tests and we all benefit if we close this python cross-compatibility issue.