Textual: Rapid Application Development framework for Python
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Re: Textual: Rapid Application Development framework for Python
#2I tried this a while back but was put off by the fake "css".
They say "The dialect of CSS used in Textual is greatly simplified over web based CSS and much easier to learn." But I immediately ran into issues trying to use css that I'm familiar with (and it wasn’t even fancy). They should have called it something else and used different syntax.
Re: Textual: Rapid Application Development framework for Python
#3This looks really cool.
In the past I used lanterna (https://github.com/mabe02/lanterna/tree/master) to develop a text UI for a critical process at the trading firm I worked at. It was essentially a process that would take updated market data and handle things that changed between the last trading session and today - like symbol renames (PCLN to BKNG), changes to market cap that make it change what "category" it fell into (they were based on market cap and volatility measures etc). Things of that nature, that the realtime system didn't handle but happened too often or were too hairy for us to just handle manually.
The system had a desktop UI component that was oriented towards use by our trading staff. We didn't really have notion of a "server UI" and the server was headless.
Nobody at our firm was a frontend developer, just backend, systems and data programmers who occasionally dabbled in frontend. So web UIs were very simplistic or highly specific to their use-case, we had no shared tooling.
In 2023 with things like create-react-app and whatever next.js does, I probably would've opted for one of those. I could've made another desktop app but I wanted to be able to easily get to this from a shitty ssh connection over tethered 4g when I was on-call. So X11 forwarding and RDP were out. So i looked around for a TUI-builder in the project's language, Java.
What i really liked about Lanterna was that it had a Swing-based implementation which meant I could easily run it from IntelliJ, and that would let me iterate rapidly, and then in production I could run it in a terminal via SSH directly on the machine the server was on (which had certain advantages).
I'll keep an eye on this to see if I can think of anything neat to build on it. I still generally don't like web apps because they feel like they take a lot of effort to get something compared to a functionally-equivalent product built in something non-browser-based like a TUI or desktop GUI.
Re: Textual: Rapid Application Development framework for Python
#4I know textualize/rich are HN darling projects, but do we really want full-color mouse driven gui applications full with superfluous animations in our terminals?
Re: Textual: Rapid Application Development framework for Python
#5Maybe I got spoiled from the time I used to play with delphi, but for me RAD screams a good UI builder built in.
Re: Textual: Rapid Application Development framework for Python
#6After a few decades of developing applications, I am convinced that frameworks are the wrong approach.
You gain development speed in the beginning, but you lose it later on when the framework introduces breaking changes and you have to keep working around a changing stack. Or the framework gets abandoned and it would be too much work to maintain it. Because it has so much bells and whistles you don't need. This one for example contains 1298 files without dependencies.
Both, coding everything yourself or using lean libraries are better. There are very few lean libraries unfortunately. Keeping code elegant and simple is a rare skill.
When there is a lean, well done library for my use case, I use it. Because if shit hits the fan, I can maintain the library myself.
Re: Textual: Rapid Application Development framework for Python
#7My favourite Textual demo at the moment is this one: https://github.com/1j01/textual-paint
It's a very decent Microsoft Paint imitation that runs in your terminal!
Re: Textual: Rapid Application Development framework for Python
#8Rapid application development is probably the wrong description. That’s already used by systems that have UI builders and code integrated, like Delphi etc and early systems like VB.
I went looking for such a thing in this project and only found examples in Python scripts.
Re: Textual: Rapid Application Development framework for Python
#9This looks great. I just finished an internal devops and change control app using unicurses and python and although it works, it will not scale well. Initially, I tried doing TK and QT but they both have their quirks with initial installation. My experience with QT is that its works well but useful documentation is sparse.
I'll definitely be giving textual a try as it fits my requirement space perfectly.
Re: Textual: Rapid Application Development framework for Python
#10After a few decades of developing applications, I am convinced that frameworks are the wrong approach. You gain development speed in the beginning, but you lose it later on when the framework introduces breaking changes and you have to keep working around a changing stack. Or the framework gets abandoned and it would be too much work to maintain it. Because it has so much bells and whistles you don't need. This one f…
> There are very few lean libraries unfortunately. Keeping code elegant and simple is a rare skill.
So... You are saying 'you should write everything yourself with libraries that basically don't exist'? I agree with you somewhat, but it's not very realistic; it's so much faster to use something that gets you 80% of the way with minimum work. And you know it'll break in a bit but that's life.
Also, frameworks like Django or ASP.NET have been pretty stable for a very long time. We have large Django projects from 10 years and updating those was a breeze.