Meta: reading file from stdin while still interacting with the terminal

I'm playing around with a curses program and would like it to behave
similarly to how vim lets me do

$ echo hello | vim -

where vim reads data from stdin but then interacts with the terminal
directrly. What magic is vim doing here?

For context, it's a dumb Python curses program, but if I try to pipe
data into it, it interprets the EOF on stdin and then complains
there's no input for the curses getch()/getkey() call.

It's not exactly vim-related other than "vim does what I want; what's
it doing under the hood?"

Thanks for any pointers you might send my way.

-tim


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