I just recompiled my python to link to ncursesw, and tried your example with a little modification:
import curses, locale locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '') s = curses.initscr() s.addstr(u'\u00c5 U+00C5 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE\n'.encode('utf-8') ) s.addstr(u'\u00f5 U+00F5 LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH TILDE\n'.encode('utf-8')) s.refresh() s.getstr() curses.endwin() And it works ok for me, Slackware-10.2, python-2.4.2, ncurses-5.4 all in KDE's konsole. My locale is mk_MK.UTF-8. Now it would be great if python's curses module worked with unicode strings directly. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list