Create Conway's Game of Life With Python (Overview)

Is there a more cross-platform friendly alternative to curses? This tutorial relies on curses for terminal text display, but this isn’t available on Windows platforms.

@Eric You might have more luck with rich, which uses the ANSI escape codes under the hood.

Hi @Eric,

I haven’t used it myself, but the documentation:

docs.python.org/3/howto/curses.html

mentions a Window port:

pypi.org/project/UniCurses

that is supposed to be a drop-in replacement.

Hi Christopher and Bartosz, thank you for your replies. I hacked my way through it using a TextView using printf(); not pretty but let me get on to the more interesting part about packaging and distribution.

I’ve taken a quick look at unicurses and think its worth sharing the following.

• unicurses: The link to the UniCurses port isn’t hosted on PyPI and seems very out of date: the download links to source-forge with a 2010 release date and only has a few 1* reviews, but helpfully point to Windows-Curses.

• Windows-Curses (pypi.org/project/windows-curses/) appears significantly more active, is installable via pip, and was last released in October 2023. It’s imported via curses so should only need a new (platform-specific) line in the pyproject.toml:[project]:dependencies lines. It seems to drop in nicely to the CursesView implemented in this video.

I’ll look at rich next!

Hi @Eric,

With rich you’ll be able to create the project, but the commands for the display will be different. Likewise with another library that may work for you: asciimatics. If you’re comfy playing with different screen display code, you’ll be good, but the approach will be different.

The code is designed around having multiple visualization implementations, with the curses code going in the “views.py” file. In your case, you’d be implementing a different view, but if you use the same interface, the rest of the code should work. Good luck with it, and please leave a comment when you’ve got your solution, others will be interested as well.

Hi, I am fairly new to Python and Object Oriented Coding and I found this article to be very instructive. Thank you! I have a question about the structure, namely the splitting into patterns.py and grid.py. With the latter we define an object of class LifeGrid that contains the pattern as a single attribute and has the methods to evolve, and display the pattern. To me it would seem natural to associate these methods directly to the Pattern class and get rid of the grid.py module. I wonder if this is just a matter of preference, or if I am missing something important aout this separation. Thank you for your help.

Hi bixiorimoldi,

The code in this course is based on the original tutorial:

realpython.com/conway-game-of-life-python/

Which is by Leodanis Pozo Ramos, and being lazy, I went with his coding style :)

For code this small, I agree, he’s used more modules and classes than I might have… but keep in mind that you’re on a code teaching site. My guess is Leodanis has done this on purpose to slyly teach the idea of separation here. If you were to start building a lot of different Conway interfaces on different platforms, his breakdown would be useful.

Another side-effect of writing it this way, especially for teaching it, is it makes it very clear the different purposes of the different structures and how they work together.

Personally, I tend to start small and then refactor if it turns out it is needed, but a lot of coders prefer a longer vision. The bigger the program, the more important the separation is, so getting some practice on smaller projects builds the skills you can use when you get to larger ones.

Hi Christopher, thank you for your prompt and clear answer.