Widgets

[dvarrazzo]

Hello,

I have a command line tool which should be extended to allow users to choose among several settings, so I'm thinking to add an interactive mode, where settings would be chosen in menus via combo boxes, input boxes, etc. Very Windows 95 dialog forms. The users use Linux, Windows, macOS.

Would Textual be a good choice for this type of app? I haven't seen, in the example, any demo about widgets. Should I have to write my own check box class, in order to use Textual?

Thank you very much!

[USLTD]

Currently, textual doesn't have any input widgets and only third party library - textual-inputs is available which is experimental, so I recommend using other TUI library or write your own input widgets but remember that it may not work as intended since textual's code and API is constantly changing.

[dvarrazzo]

Thank you very much. Is there any TUI you feel like suggesting for my use case? Something to create easily a simple, if boring, form, and to be multi-platform?

I will be happy to come back and check Textual once it is more stable 🙂

[sanders41]

I have not used it myself, but I have see others do interesting TUIs with curses. I know it can accept text input, but I’m not sure about combo boxes, check boxes, etc.

[USLTD]

Thank you very much. Is there any TUI you feel like suggesting for my use case? Something to create easily a simple, if boring, form, and to be multi-platform?

I will be happy to come back and check Textual once it is more stable 🙂

There are many variations and each of them have their own pros and cons.

Urwid
Blessings
Blessed
Notcurses (Python bindings)
Npyscreen

And more.

[dvarrazzo]

Nothing based on curses works on Windows, right?

• Blessed seems to work on Windows, but it's about positions and colours, not widgets,
• Blessing is older, Blessed forked from it, unmaintained for 2 years, no Windows
• Npyscreen had no releases for 7 years. wrapper around curses
• urwid doesn't work on windows
• notcurses is not packaged for windows and takes a massive toolchain to build there - no pip install.

My question was, is there any TUI portable and widget-oriented around? I'd take this as a no.

[USLTD]

Python-only libraries

There is also cross-platform nurses_2, successor to nurses, or Python Prompt Toolkit.
There is also currently-Unix-only pyTermTK, successor to pyCuT.

There are also other less-known TUI projects which you can search using GitHub or google.