Bug report

Bug description:

Python 3.12 dropped ncurses wide char support on macOS, so for example curses.get_wch() is not available anymore.

I believe this was an unintended consequence of #94452, because the change is not documented anywhere. After that PR, HAVE_NCURSESW is never defined on Darwin. It looks like this bit of logic was not ported from setup.py to configure.ac:

In fact, wide char support is always available when using Apple-provided ncurses, and it used to work correctly in the 3.11 builds that I tested.

@tiran can you confirm that this was unintended?

cc @sobolevn who interpreted this as an intended change in python/typeshed#10808.

CPython versions tested on:

3.12, 3.13

Operating systems tested on:

macOS

Linked PRs

• gh-111460: restore ncurses widechar support on macOS #111878
• [3.12] gh-111460: Restore ncurses widechar support on macOS (GH-111878) #112034