Show HN: My TUI library, PyTermGUI now features an intelligent layout system
15 points • 2 comments
@bczsalba
From 2/28/2022, 9:38:51 PM till now, @bczsalba has achieved 78 Karma Points with the contribution count of 15.
Recent @bczsalba Activity
Show HN: My TUI library can now export HTML and SVG screenshots of your terminal
3 points • 0 comments
This will allow developers to freely use RGB and HEX colors in the terminal, without having to worry about end-user terminal compatibility and such. It uses some color math, a lot of infrastracture and some magic!
Show HN: My TUI lib now features auto RGB to xterm16 graceful color degradation
1 points • 1 comments
So I'm midway through implmementing it all, and I'm finding that a lot of both meta and alt keys have behaviours that block them from working on my Mac. I know on Linux it probably isn't like that, but a lot of people will have Meta- bindings for some actions in the UI. Would it be a huge issue if it defaulted to CTRL? ATM I'm having issues even recording the value of my meta keypresses as too many of them are default bindings in MacOS.
Edit: Regardless, it is now pushed on GH. Will be included in next version, thank you both for the suggestion!
Alright, I'll keep that in mind! Thank you for the suggestion :D
It's similar but different in a lot of ways.
In PyTermGUI there is a large focus on the underlying terminal APIs and their implementations. This is because there are no external libraries to help us with them, so everything is hand-coded, and as an extension available to anyone from the outside. While the flashy part of PTG is the WindowManager class, the library is just as well suited for minimal applications such as converting your scripts' boring output to colored text or a nice looking Container. This is not advertised as much as it doesn't look that cool compared to everything else, but there is real value in it.
There is also some conceptual differences: Rich and Textual are very web-based in how they work and their syntacies, while PTG is very much not. This doesn't show up in many places, but for example in Rich, expressing an xterm-256 color would be like:
[color(141)]This is lavender
[141]This is lavender
[rgb(111, 222, 333)]I have no idea what this color is
[111;222;333]I have no idea what this color is
Other than that it's a lot of minor things. Most ideas can be created with either, though depending on your needs one might be more suitable than the other. For example, Textual does not support windowing in any way, while PyTermGUI does support full-screening, so if you want to create a modal popup on top of a larger background screen my version should be a bit easier to achieve it with.
Also, PTG code tends to be a bit shorter and usually easier to read, and IMO our markup syntax is much nicer (and as a fact, our parser significantly faster) and our Widget system is a bit easier to manage and extend.
After thinking about it overnight, I'm thinking about adding a button type that automatically binds its onclick method to either a given or automatically generated binding.
So something like
ptg.KeyboardButton("Help")
ptg.KeyboardButton("Action", binding=ptg.keys.CTRL_B)
Could you elaborate on this on more? I tried on xterm and it worked the way it should've. If you could raise an issue on GH I can look into it further, as it definitely seems like behaviour that should be fixed.
Thank you so much for checking it out!
Thank you!
IIRC it used to work just fine, but it hasn't for a minute. There is some weird handling with ESC, as most of the time it is the start of a longer sequence, so I probably just messed something up in that while refactoring.
Will look into it when I have the time, thank you!
Thank you! As long as the terminal supports the xterm-256 colors everything should work alright, and even below that the colors might look a bit off but nothing should break, per se.
The resizing bit was a bit of a mess to implement properly, but the current system does things like calculate the predicted minimum width of a window and not letting you minimize further, among other things.
At the moment not many, but full-screen layout support is planned. The eventual "end-state" of the framework would be something along the lines of MC, where there is a main, fullscreen display that contains a bunch of inner elements. These inner elements would then create modal windows, allows user input and display data as needed. Only difference from MC and the like is in this case the windows aren't just things that look like windows, but they actually act and behave like it too.
Fair question though! WindowManager honestly started off as a joke with my friend, and just so happened to end up being the main "entry point" to the library. In the future pre-defined (or even dynamic) layouts should allow the above mentioned to happen when needed, but also keep all the optional mouse input shenanigans working as intended.
Edit: One thing that I think can showcase some of the upsides an architecture like this has is an ongoing project of mine based on PTG, https://github.com/bczsalba/Pagoda. It is primarily a frontend for a WIP messaging protocol me an my friend are creating, but the main idea behind it is the chat functionality is all confined within an "application", and that the user can write and install their own applications to be run from within Pagoda. This kind of makes the system feel like a proper desktop WM, and I think is a really cool idea. As the project is still very early the only available app is the messaging one, but I do have high hopes for it, if nothing else as a tech-demo for what PTG can do.
There is a pretty in-depth binding system that allows for the exact behaviour you are describing. This library is generally a framework with a loose implementation in the name of WindowManager. Most of these behaviours can and should be implemented in applications using this framework.
About "wasting pixels"... What if I (and many others) like the aesthetic and simplicity? There is a sort of magic in never having to leave your terminal emulator. Most frameworks are still keyboard-centered, as many of them don't even have mouse support to replace it with.
Edit: Thank you for your interest though! If you have a syntactically neat way to do the things you talked about feel free to raise an issue and I'll get to it as it comes up.
Show HN: A modular Python TUI framework with a fast and pretty markup language
114 points • 19 comments
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