Drekins module at https://github.com/Drekin/win-unicode-console is great, but there is small issue with it when running within debugger in Visual Studio (Python Tools for Visual Studio 2.1 installed). Debugger already wraps stdout and stderr inside the visualstudio_py_debugger._DebuggerOutput wrapper and it does not have the fileno() method which win-unicode-console stream.py check_stream() expects. I've created potential fix for it at https://github.com/Drekin/win-unicode-console/pull/4/commits that checks whether object has old_out and uses it to get to fileno. There might be much more robust ways to check for wrappers. I just wanted to make you aware, if this code will be used as basis for Python 3.5.