Things I've learned building a modern TUI Framework (2022)
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Re: Things I've learned building a modern TUI Framework (2022)
#2In case you missed this: Casey vs Windows terminal
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27725559
Re: Things I've learned building a modern TUI Framework (2022)
#3> The first trick is "overwrite, don't clear"
This is how games were written back in the day before DirectX was a thing. You'd write directly to the frame buffer and instead of clearing and redrawing, you'd redraw what changed and what was around and under it (because there was no time to refresh the entire view in time in addition to everything else you need to do)
Re: Things I've learned building a modern TUI Framework (2022)
#4My big complaint with textual is that it wants to be react. I can see why it would want to be react, that's a very popular framework that a lot of people are already familiar with, but I don't think it's actually a good way of doing user interfaces. But the basic reactive design is a well trod road, and basing your system design on something that's known to work is a great way to derisk the project. Sure, we'll draw some heavy inspiration from react.
Alright, so we're using some bastardization of CSS as well? That might be going a little bit too far. The react model already breaks the idea of CSS in a lot of ways, preferring standardized components. Sure, developers still use CSS to customize components, but I view that more as a side effect of how react evolved rather than as a justifiable architectural choice. But as long as you don't have to use CSS I suppose it's fine.
Last I tried it, you do have to use CSS. There are no good standard components, so you will be making your own, and instead of having components be one nice self encapsulated Python class the standard docs use things like list components and then style them with an external style sheet.
For those reasons textual just isn't for me yet. In python there should be one, and preferably only one, obvious way to do something. By mirroring react so closely they're also mirroring what I see as the JavaScript communities biggest vice.
Re: Things I've learned building a modern TUI Framework (2022)
#5Interesting that they're hiring. I'm curious how they plan to make money from a TUI framework
Re: Things I've learned building a modern TUI Framework (2022)
#6Interesting that they're hiring. I'm curious how they plan to make money from a TUI framework
the jobs link gives a 404 error
Re: Things I've learned building a modern TUI Framework (2022)
#7My big complaint with textual is that it wants to be react. I can see why it would want to be react, that's a very popular framework that a lot of people are already familiar with, but I don't think it's actually a good way of doing user interfaces. But the basic reactive design is a well trod road, and basing your system design on something that's known to work is a great way to derisk the project. Sure, we'll draw…
Can you elaborate on how textual wants to be like the react framework? I don't see React (or react) mentioned anywhere in the article.
Re: Things I've learned building a modern TUI Framework (2022)
#8Re: Things I've learned building a modern TUI Framework (2022)
#9It's funny how every TUI developer eventually stumbles over Unicode and then handling international characters and emojis correctly turns into its own project close to the same scope of (or even bigger than) the original TUI project. It happened to me on rivo/tview and through the resulting rivo/uniseg package, I learned that all other TUI library maintainers deal with the same issues. Finally, everyone invents their own unique solutions to the problem because character width is not standardized and terminals are messy, as noted in the article. OP simply supports Unicode 9 only (Unicode is at version 15.1 at the moment). Sooner or later, users will complain, however, that certain emojis or international characters are not rendered correctly. So I'm not sure that this is a great solution.
Re: Things I've learned building a modern TUI Framework (2022)
#10My big complaint with textual is that it wants to be react. I can see why it would want to be react, that's a very popular framework that a lot of people are already familiar with, but I don't think it's actually a good way of doing user interfaces. But the basic reactive design is a well trod road, and basing your system design on something that's known to work is a great way to derisk the project. Sure, we'll draw…
Can you elaborate on how textual wants to be like the react framework? I don't see React (or react) mentioned anywhere in the article.
They have a virtual DoM https://textual.textualize.io/api/dom_node/
This includes a lot of what you'd expect from HTML, classes, CSS, etc.
They have reactive attributes https://textual.textualize.io/guide/reactivity/
It has HTML (or at least a DoM), css, and you design widgets the same way.