urwid VS python-prompt-toolkit

Pretty cool! I actually wrote something VERY similar a couple of years ago: sless[1]. It's a tool for viewing json-based structured logs. Just like your tool, you can explore into a json object. The difference is, it expects the input to have many json objects, newline separated, and it shows few keys as a preview of the object, to make looking for something in the log easier. It's not quite complete but basic browsing works. It was mainly written to learn more about Urwid[2], a library similar to Curses.

1: https://github.com/dpedu2/sless

2: https://urwid.org/

In addition to the other great libraries already mentioned, since you're in Python you may want to consider urwid, it's really robust and has a lot of built-ins.

To go full in on the latter case, people often use libraries like Cursive (akin to urwid for Python but without the horrendously confusing error messages caused duck typing) or tui.

If you have experience with text user interfaces in the past, you might come across other frameworks such as urwid, curtsies, asciimatics, prompt-toolkit to name a few. Nevertheless, If you have not, you are just fine because you are in the right place to learn about TUIs in general and using Textual specifically. I’ll show you how to develop a wordle clone step by step.

Check also urwid. It's more likely a modern text-based interface library for Python. https://github.com/urwid/urwid

Curses seems difficult to use but you should investigate whether it works with what you want to do. https://urwid.org/ seems fun as an alternative.

You can also take a look at https://urwid.org/

urwid is Python, and looks good.

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