Terminal - How to overwrite many lines?

Question

I want to overwrite the hello. But when a \n was printed i can't come back to that line. So what do applications do which overwrite many lines like the program htop.

import sys

print 'hello'
print 'huhu',
print '\r\r\rnooooo\r'

Answer 1

The colorama third party module has support for changing the position of the cursor, via the "\x1b[?:?H" command string. You can also clear the screen this way.

import colorama
colorama.init()
def put_cursor(x,y):
    print "\x1b[{};{}H".format(y+1,x+1)

def clear():
    print "\x1b[2J"

clear()
put_cursor(0,0)
print "hello"
print "huhu"
#return to first line
put_cursor(0,0)
print "noooooo"

The module appears to do this by importing ctypes and invoking windll.kernel32.SetConsoleCursorPosition. See win32.py, line 58.