reflex-vty VS python-prompt-toolkit

There's a slick little Haskell library that does something similar called reflex-vty:

https://github.com/reflex-frp/reflex-vty#reflex-vty

One thing neither of these libraries appear to have done yet that I would really like is create a more compact window rendering. Currently each window gets a 1-character border. What I would like is something that saves space by collapsing adjacent windows' borders into a single character instead of having two redundant borders next to each other. Of course I get why they do it the way they do, but terminals are often more constrained for space and with complex UIs you can lose a fair amount due to these unnecessary borders. That would be the next thing I'd hack on to improve these kinds of libraries. But alas...too many fun projects to hack on and not enough hours in the day.

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