notcurses VS python-prompt-toolkit

> The only reason we don't have animation frameworks for the terminal is because it's not possible

https://nick-black.com/dankwiki/index.php/Notcurses

Notcurses. Install it and run notcurses-demo to be suitably impressed.

Same for me, I would be much more motivated if there was something like textual for Rust. Given the capability of terminal emulators now I think Rust is lacking behind in the TUI field. Just checkout what can be done with something like notcurses

On the application side of rendering, see notcurses, it is at the leading edge: https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses

Other TUI libraries of note: https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/blob/master/doc/OT...

The broader world probably knows him best for the terminal handling library Notcurses[1] and a lot of telling terminal emulator authors to get their shit together.

I’ve had his grad-school project libtorque[2] (HotPar ’10), an event-handling and scheduling library, on my to-read list for years, but I can’t seem to figure out how it accomplishes the interesting things it does.

[1] https://nick-black.com/dankwiki/index.php/Notcurses, https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/

[2] https://nick-black.com/dankwiki/index.php/Libtorque

In XTerm, this (rightly) makes no difference. In Foot and Contour however, you still end up a line resp. a screen below where you started, if now with the correct horizontal position.

So it seems to me like what you want should work by default, except it doesn’t.

It should be possible to instead just treat the whole thing as a graphical overlay (by computing or directly asking for the character cell size, as Kirill Panov rightly admonishes me is possible with XTWINOPS) without touching the cursor; that’s what the “sixel scrolling” setting (DECSDM) is supposed to do. Then you can just manually move the cursor forward however many positions after you’re done drawing.

Except apparently the DEC manual (the VT330/340 one above) and DEC hardware contradict each other as to which setting of DECSDM (set or reset) corresponds to which scrolling state (enabled or disabled), and XTerm has implemented it according to the manual not the VT3xx[1,2,3]—then most other emulators followed suit[4]—then XTerm switched to following the hardware[5,6] (unless you and that’s what I’m seeing on my machine right now. So now you need to check if you’re on XTerm ≥ 369 or not[7]. If I’m reading the Notcurses code right, other terminals have followed suit[8].

Again, ouch.

P.S. It seems DEC had an internal doc for how their terminals should operate (DEC STD 070) [9]. It does not document DECSDM at all.

[1] https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/217#issuecomment-86449...

[2] https://github.com/hackerb9/lsix/issues/41

[3] https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/issues/1782

[4] https://github.com/arakiken/mlterm/pull/23

[5] https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html#xterm_369

[6] https://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.html#h3-T...

[7] https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/commit/0918fa251e2... (the correct version cutoff is 369 not 359, the patch contains a now-fixed bug)

[8] https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/blob/master/src/li... (look for mentions of invertsixel)

[9] http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/standards/EL-SM070-00_DEC_S...

And there's also the notcurses library:

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