Show HN: Textual – An async-powered terminal application framework for Python

github.com

66 points·willm··13 comments

I'm the author of Rich, a Python library for fancy formatting in the terminal. Textual is a framework I'm building around Rich for creating terminal applications. It's powered by async and borrows a number of techniques from web development.

It's still in active development, but it has reached a point where you can play with it. The most recent release adds a tree control which you can use to navigate a directory and pick files.

My hope is that a Textual UI will be at-least as easy to write as a command line interface, and projects will grow a --tui switch to launch an interactive app.

There's already an app using Textual: [wtpython](https://github.com/what-the-python/wtpython)

I'm a big fan of Rich [1], thank you Will for creating it! Very impressive to see how much it evolved over the last year.

[1] https://github.com/willmcgugan/rich

Cheers!

Exactly what I have been looking for

Will are there examples of how to use textual with Rich ? Thanks

It would be the other way around. Basically anything that Rich can print can be used in Textual. Have a look at the render method in the examples, which returns a Rich object.

Is it inspired by aiohttp or which web framework do you plan on using as inspiration for textual

From what I can see textual is purely for the terminal. Nothing involving HTTP.

Didn't realize it says "inspired by modern web development". Nevermind.

Ah, I haven't explained myself well there. It is inspired by JS web frameworks. Vue in particular.

Definitely one of the coolest things I've ever seen. I really hope it it going to mature and prosper.

Fingers crossed!

Really cool. Thx!

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