picotui VS asciimatics

pycopy – a minimalist and memory-efficient Python dialect

It's great to see some more competitors on the TUI front of the Python ecosystem! I recently tried multiple existing frameworks and was not particularly happy with the state.

Here are the main contenders for libraries that provide higher-level API than urwid/ncurses:

* Picotui, https://github.com/pfalcon/picotui

* Npyscreen, https://github.com/npcole/npyscreen

* py_cui, https://github.com/jwlodek/py_cui

Both Picotui and Npyscreen are relatively unmaintained / considered feature-full. py_cui seems to be in the best shape.

Fingers crossed for this project making it through, building on top of Rich gives it quite a bit of headstart. You can also sponsor @willmcgugan on Github [0].

[0]: https://github.com/sponsors/willmcgugan

test - use a TUI if you don't want line based, like picotui

For small apps, I may choose a TUI (Terminal User Interface). Curses for Python is very lightweight, but quite low level and difficult to use for anything more than a very simple interface (if your app tries to draw outside of the drawing area, the app crashes, so you have to carefully manage every detail). Textual and asciimatics are both mature TUI frameworks that provide a higher level and more Pythonic way to create TUI's.

If you are looking for something more flexible that just printing to a terminal, take a look at Asciimatics and textual. Both are available from Pypi.

Scroll down to the TUI example in the README, just above the documentation link: https://github.com/peterbrittain/asciimatics

Download fireworks.py

Source code: https://github.com/peterbrittain/asciimatics/blob/master/samples/fireworks.py

I have made yet another ssh connection manager with TUI, using asciimatics and tinyDB.

Personally I dig the aesthetics of asciimatics, it's quite handy and cross-platform.

I've used asciimatics in the past to good effect.

Take a look at rich (kinda new, but pretty neat), asciimatics, or urwid