ANN: asciimatics v1.7.0
I am very pleased to announce asciimatics v1.7.0! This is a major update since the last announced version of the package. ## What is asciimatics? Asciimatics is a package to help people create full-screen text UIs (from interactive forms to complex text animations) on Linux, Windows and OSX. It supports python 2 & 3 and is licensed under the Apache Software Foundation License 2.0. ## What’s new? This release includes a `widgets` sub-package to create text User Interfaces, complete with the standard basic set of widgets you would expect for creating forms – e.g. text boxes, check boxes, buttons, etc. Despite its name, asciimatics now fully supports Unicode in utf-8 environments, allowing for non-ASCII input from the keyboard and output to the screen. This is extended to the widgets, so you can use them for languages other than English. A new Plasma renderer was added, continuing the theme of retro special effects. This one can be used to create lava-lamp style animated backgrounds. See the new plasma.py sample for an example of how to use it. A `highlight()` method was added to the Screen to allow you to colour wash parts of the screen as if you were using a highlighter pen. This can be used to highlight or lowlight parts of the screen. For an example, have a look at the shadows on a Frame in the forms.py sample. A complete suite of unit tests and CI builds have been created, to ensure that the code continues to run across all supported environments. Latest results are always available at the project home page. Various other minor enhancements and fixes have gone in. For a complete list have a look at the change log: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/peterbrittain/asciimatics/ master/CHANGES.rst ## Where can I find out more? https://github.com/peterbrittain/asciimatics -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Python TUI that will work on DOS/Windows and Unix/Linux
I noticed this trail on Google... if you're still interested, you could try out https://github.com/peterbrittain/asciimatics I ported it to Windows from Linux so exactly the same API works on both. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
A high-level cross-platform API for terminal/console access
I have recently been working on a terminal/console animation package (https://github.com/peterbrittain/asciimatics). Beyond the high-level animation methods/objects it provides, it also needed to be cross-platform and and simple to install with pip (including any dependencies). This cross-platform requirement meant I needed a curses equivalent for Windows. This appears to have been a regular issue over the years and I've looked around at previous answers on the web and this newsgroup. Now while there's some pretty neat stuff out there, nothing actually gave me everything I needed. 1) colorama only gives you colours and cursor positioning, but no input, resizing or screen-scraping options. 2) blessings/blessed provide better (but incomplete) APIs than the curses package, but no Windows support unless you use colorama (which is still limited as above). 3) console (from effbot.org) is a native installer and so fails the pip test. It does however show direct use of the win32 API is a tenable approach. 4) The other packages I found were either dead projects or relied on a native installation of an open source implementation of curses - with no pip install option available. I therefore started writing a consistent wrapper API (the Screen object) that uses the curses package on Unix variants and pywin32 to access the Windows console API. Over the last few months I've rounded out the features and proved that asciimatics works identically on Linux (various distros), OSX and Windows 7-10. I know that there are still some rough edges due to the history of the project and so I've been deprecating old APIs in preparation for creating a completely clean API when I create the next major (v2.x) release. I suspect that it could be even better though, so am looking for feedback and ideas from the community - both on the high-level animation features and the low-level cross-platform terminal API. Is there something you can see that could be usefully improved? All feedback welcome. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: A high-level cross-platform API for terminal/console access
> > Did you try https://pypi.python.org/pypi/UniCurses ? > Yes - it failed to install with pip and also looked like a dead project when I followed the project home page URL. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: A high-level cross-platform API for terminal/console access
On Wednesday, October 21, 2015 at 11:26:40 PM UTC+1, eryksun wrote: > > Also check out the curses module that's available on Christoph Gohlke's site: > > http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#curses Neat. I wasn't aware of this library of wheel installations. I'll have a look at how that works out and see if I can rationalize my mapping code. First impression is that this might be tricky, though, as I've had issues with older Linux distributions using ncurses 5 and so handling 256 colour modes has been difficult due to limits on colour pairs. This meant I had to fall back to looking up and using codes in the terminfo database using tigetstr. According to the PDcurses docs, these APIs are all just stubs that return an error and so I'll probably need a curses and PDcurses mapping layer from the looks of things - which is not much better than a curses and win32 mapping layer. I'm also still not convinced that curses package is the right API to expose for Python. While ncurses does a great job of abstracting away the issues of terminal inter-operation, the Python curses package is just a thin wrapper of that C library and, as can be seen above, not truly cross-platform due to the restrictions of PDcurses. Shouldn't we have a higher level simplification? Something that hides away all the complexity of handling all these different platforms and so exposes a simple API? One that humans can use without worrying about these issues? -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: A high-level cross-platform API for terminal/console access
On Thursday, October 22, 2015 at 10:24:11 AM UTC+1, Laura Creighton wrote: > Fredrik Lundh's console implementation > http://effbot.org/zone/console-handbook.htm > might be of interest in that case, but I think it is 'old versions > of windows only'. But it's a different take on the abstraction > problem. I haven't used it for something like 15 years now, though, > so can barely remember it ... Thanks, but I think this is already covered in my original post: I couldn't use it directly due to the pip installation restriction. I've now created a working Windows implementation, so I don't need another mapping for win32. More generally, as these posts begin to show, there was no _simple_ way for me to get a cross-platform console API that "just worked" out of the box. I've had to jump through various hoops to get to where I am and don't think that other people should have to go through the same pain as I have. This is one of the reasons why I've been tidying up my package to make this as simple as possible for the next person. I've now got to the stage where I have something that works for me, but it is almost certainly missing something. Maybe it's not good enough documentation, maybe there's some clunkiness left in the API due to the history of the project, maybe there's an even better way to represent terminals than what I've come up with so far? I was hoping for feedback on this front rather than other ways I could recreate the curses package - unless of course, the general consensus is that this really is the way that Python should expose access to the terminal/console. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: A high-level cross-platform API for terminal/console access
On Thursday, October 22, 2015 at 12:25:09 PM UTC+1, Gisle Vanem wrote: > I tried installing your package with "pip.exe -v install asciimatics". > Some problem with pypiwin32 it seems: > > Installing collected packages: pypiwin32, future, Pillow, pyfiglet, > asciimatics > > Cleaning up... > Exception: > Traceback (most recent call last): > File > "g:\Programfiler\Python27\lib\site-packages\pip-6.0.6-py2.7.egg\pip\basecommand.py", > line 232, in main > status = self.run(options, args) > File > "g:\Programfiler\Python27\lib\site-packages\pip-6.0.6-py2.7.egg\pip\commands\install.py", > line 347, in run > root=options.root_path, > File > "g:\Programfiler\Python27\lib\site-packages\pip-6.0.6-py2.7.egg\pip\req\req_set.py", > line 549, in install > **kwargs > File > "g:\Programfiler\Python27\lib\site-packages\pip-6.0.6-py2.7.egg\pip\req\req_install.py", > line 751, in install > self.move_wheel_files(self.source_dir, root=root) > File > "g:\Programfiler\Python27\lib\site-packages\pip-6.0.6-py2.7.egg\pip\req\req_install.py", > line 960, in move_wheel_files > isolated=self.isolated, > File > "g:\Programfiler\Python27\lib\site-packages\pip-6.0.6-py2.7.egg\pip\wheel.py", > line 234, in move_wheel_files > clobber(source, lib_dir, True) > File > "g:\Programfiler\Python27\lib\site-packages\pip-6.0.6-py2.7.egg\pip\wheel.py", > line 212, in clobber > shutil.copyfile(srcfile, destfile) > File "g:\Programfiler\Python27\lib\shutil.py", line 83, in copyfile > with open(dst, 'wb') as fdst: > IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: > 'g:\\Programfiler\\Python27\\Lib\\site-packages\\win32\\win32api.pyd' > > - > > BTW, this is on Python 2.7.9 on Win-XP SP3. > > --gv That's a new one on me. The pypiwin32 package has installed fine for me on Python 3 in Windows 7, 8 and 10. Sadly I don't have ready access to an XP machine, so can't easily try a repro myself... Does the file already exist, or are you lacking permissions to update the folder? -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
