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I believe this is a curses/ncurses limitation and not a 
bug, though  admittedly the limitation doesn't make much 
sense for windows that don't touch the lower-right corner 
of the terminal.  You could try writing the analogous C 
program and see if that also fails to work.

Making the window scrollable with w.scrollok(1) allows 
this to work, at the cost of making the window scroll up 
a line.