jexer VS python-prompt-toolkit

Very interesting! I was thinking literally yesterday about a TUI/GUI Qubes type concept, maybe also applicable for industrial type data diodes.

I did something like that once. Is your project online somewhere? I'm always curious what else is going on. :)

When I transliterated from D to Java around 2015, Java wasn't quite the "uninteresting" language it is perceived to be today. But all along I had hoped others might pick up some tricks, and put some notes on porting it here. Yet Java's been a pretty solid workhorse for me, and having the Swing GUI to test on was a godsend actually once I got into images.

If you code in Java, and like TUI (console type applications), then you might enjoy Jexer: https://gitlab.com/klamonte/jexer

I started Jexer in 2013, and off-and-on it's gotten better. I think my favorite part has been crossing paths with other terminal emulator ecosystem folks over the last few years. This release brings a few prettified effects inspired by other projects that you are all hopefully quite familiar with (notcurses, chafa, and vtm):

* Translucent windows, including images under/over each other and text.

* Animated/pulsing text

* Animated gifs

* A new XtermVideoPlayer example that uses ffmpeg/JavaCV to play movies inside a text-draggable window. (No audio though.)

* New button styles: round, diamond, left/right arrows. The button ends and shadows are drawn with images so specific font support is not required.

* A _much_ faster and _much_ higher quality sixel encoder.

* Different window border styles: single, double, none, and rounded corners.

* A femme theme option.

Some screenshots are posted here: https://twitter.com/AutumnMeowMeow/status/148922891703050240...

It's on maven and Sourceforge.

If you code in Java, and like TUI (console type applications), and enjoy transfemme in-jokes, then you might also enjoy jexer.

A path that started in the BBS era and is currently bringing DOOM to Xterm. And ironically, there is much better support for this now than there ever was for RIPscript.

Story time: when I first posted Jexer to Reddit, people were all "twin does that". No, it does not. twin does not pass vttest. twin has almost no widgets. twin does not support images at all, it does not multiplex images, it does not multihead images, and it does not play videos (a bit too slowly but still) in a text draggable/resizable window that could be part of a larger system. mpv/mplayer doesn't do those things either. In fact, the only two projects I know of that can do these kinds of tricks are Jexer and notcurses. (And notcurses is hella faster and great, and I would have used it in 2013 when I started Jexer, but it didn't exist then.)

One way to do translucent windows. - Inspired by notcurses

foot is great, dnkl is great. It's so far the fastest sixel-supporting terminal I've got to test XtermDOOM on. (I run iTerm2-based images against wezterm.)

It parses them, but then reduces to the 8/16 ANSI colors. Which makes translucent TUI windows not work. :(

Ref. https://github.com/prompt-toolkit/python-prompt-toolkit and https://github.com/c-bata/go-prompt ?

> The purpose is not to do this however, the goal for a repl cli is usually to invoke a set of particular, already implemented commands, not on the fly python input and output. The implementation will be predefined and packaged, repl are only used to run a list of specific commands with arguments that implementation has already defined.

That's a very strange definition for a REPL, I would just call that an (interactive) CLI. Maybe that's why you couldn't find anything when you were doing your search? I used python-prompt-toolkit [0] when building such interfaces. pgcli [1] is an example of such an interface built with prompt-toolkit.

It has a lot of nice autocomplete and readline emulation options. Maybe it's something you can integrate with your project.

[0] https://github.com/prompt-toolkit/python-prompt-toolkit

[1] https://www.pgcli.com/

Euporie uses prompt_toolkit as its TUI library. prompt_toolkit does not specifically support terminal graphics, but I've written various of custom components and modifications to enable images to be displayed using terminal graphics.

That bothered me too, the default function for Ctrl-W in ipython is unix-word-rubout from python-prompt-toolkit [1], which uses spaces for word boundaries. You can rebind it to backward-kill-word so it uses "not a letter nor a digit" as a word boundary.

Here's a gist with my config (also binds shift-left/right arrow to move to previous space instead of visual select): https://gist.github.com/fratajczak/64e32421a43d3b8194d0409ce...

[1]: https://github.com/prompt-toolkit/python-prompt-toolkit/blob...

When coding in python I've used ptpython repl based on prompt-toolkit which has been used in numerous CLI programs https://github.com/prompt-toolkit/python-prompt-toolkit/blob/master/PROJECTS.rst. I've also used mycli from that page. I've really enjoyed the UX of these. In addition to the syntax highlighting, auto/tab completions, (and maybe other enjoyable features) the vi-mode is amazingly helpful (for us vi folks) (it's probably got emacs bindings too). I would love to have all of this in a repl for lua.

That's an interesting approach. I was also thinking of using a more sophisticated framework than whiptail, maybe the PromptToolkit. I guess it then would be more similar to the idea of using a text editor. I certainly do think a TUI may be overkill yet it was also a good excuse to practice some bash scripting for me.

Try prompt_toolkit which is a Python library used by IPython among others: https://github.com/prompt-toolkit/python-prompt-toolkit