textual VS PySimpleGUI

Textual – We love spicing up our terminal interface for using the Portia SDK and even non-technical customers love it when I run demos from the terminal now. We all have our favourite terminal flavour of it – I made mine with Atari retro vibes 🕹️holler if you’re using Portia and want the code for it!

Flashy TUIs have been around for a few years. Check out the galleries for TUI frameworks:

https://ratatui.rs/showcase/apps/

https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea/tree/main/example...

https://textual.textualize.io/

I've been drafting a blog post about their pros and cons. You're right, text input doesn't feel like a true REPL, probably because they're not using readline. And we see more borders and whitespace because people can afford the screen space.

But there's perks like mouse support, discoverable commands, and color cues. Also, would you prefer someone make a mediocre GUI or a mediocre GUI for your workflows?

It’s a modern, terminal-based file manager built from the ground up with the incredible Textual framework for Python.

The point of the exercise is mainly on learning and discovery. If our game were developed with a text-based UI through Textual, or even Typer, some extra work is needed to ensure I/O is redirected properly.

Nice job, you should add it here: https://textual.textualize.io/#built-with-textual

If you’re a Python developer, the Textual library from Textualize.io provides a modern, feature-rich way to build stunning TUIs with ease.

Just a heads up: PySimpleGUI 5 isn't open source any more [0], and the official GitHub repo was replaced with a stub [1]. From the blog post, it sounds like the people behind it will probably remove the FOSS version from PyPI soon.

It's possible the community will fork it with a version of PySimpleGUI 4 that's still kicking around, but I haven't seen one yet.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39369353

[1] https://github.com/PySimpleGUI/PySimpleGUI

Their old CONTRIBUTING file <https://github.com/PySimpleGUI/PySimpleGUI/blob/1fa911cafee6...> said:

> Pull requests are not being accepted for the project. This includes sending code changes via other means than "pull requests". Plainly put, code you send will not be used.

> I don't mean to be ugly. This isn't personal. Heck, I don't know "you",the reader personally. It's not about ego. It's complicated. The result is that it allows me to dedicate my life to this project. It's what's required, for whatever reason, for me to do this. That's the best explanation I have. I love and respect the users of this work.

It's obvious in hindsight that those reasons were a bald-faced lie, and the real reason was exactly that he could legally do this rug pull.

From https://github.com/PySimpleGUI/PySimpleGUI/issues/142

> 2023 is going to be the "Make or Break" year. I ultimately need to determine if the project is going to continue. To date, it's nowhere near sustainable. The income doesn't cover the cost of the project, meaning that it's not only unable to allow me to pay for my cost of living, but I continue to rack up debt, borrowing money, to keep the project functional.

> This isn't new information if you've followed the over 1,200 announcements I've made since Sept 2018. The data is available should you wish to look at the GitHub Sponsorships and do the simple math required to calculate income from Udemy. It would be great for the project to keep going. I'm hopeful, but more than hope's required to keep the project going.

So if you like this project and want to see it around in the future, please support it.

Github sponsors is probably the best place: https://github.com/sponsors/PySimpleGUI

The psutil package makes getting a list of running programs not very difficult. There's an example demo program that polls once a second and displays the top process using CPU time. You could use it as a starting point perhaps.

How does it compare with remi? https://github.com/rawpython/remi

Looking at the examples, for quick UIs, REMI seems simpler. And PySimpleGUI (https://github.com/PySimpleGUI/PySimpleGUI) offers REMI as a backend to deploy on web too (PySimpleGUI is pretty simple to learn).

Random Password Generator (what an orginal name!) or RPG for short is a simple password generator that uses PySimpleGUI GUI framework, in order to have a user-friendly interface and also because i wanted to have fun.