akshay-jay 0.0.2

A small example package

Tutorial

https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/tutorials/packaging-projects/

========= Blessings

Coding with Blessings looks like this... ::

from blessings import Terminal

t = Terminal()

print t.bold('Hi there!')
print t.bold_red_on_bright_green('It hurts my eyes!')

with t.location(0, t.height - 1):
    print 'This is at the bottom.'

Or, for byte-level control, you can drop down and play with raw terminal capabilities::

print '{t.bold}All your {t.red}bold and red base{t.normal}'.format(t=t)
print t.wingo(2)

Full API Reference <https://blessings.readthedocs.io/>_

The Pitch

Blessings lifts several of curses_' limiting assumptions, and it makes your code pretty, too:

• Use styles, color, and maybe a little positioning without necessarily clearing the whole screen first.
• Leave more than one screenful of scrollback in the buffer after your program exits, like a well-behaved command-line app should.
• Get rid of all those noisy, C-like calls to tigetstr and tparm, so your code doesn't get crowded out by terminal bookkeeping.
• Act intelligently when somebody redirects your output to a file, omitting the terminal control codes the user doesn't want to see (optional).

.. _curses: http://docs.python.org/library/curses.html

Before And After

Without Blessings, this is how you'd print some underlined text at the bottom of the screen::

from curses import tigetstr, setupterm, tparm
from fcntl import ioctl
from os import isatty
import struct
import sys
from termios import TIOCGWINSZ

# If we want to tolerate having our output piped to other commands or
# files without crashing, we need to do all this branching:
if hasattr(sys.stdout, 'fileno') and isatty(sys.stdout.fileno()):
    setupterm()
    sc = tigetstr('sc')
    cup = tigetstr('cup')
    rc = tigetstr('rc')
    underline = tigetstr('smul')
    normal = tigetstr('sgr0')
else:
    sc = cup = rc = underline = normal = ''
print sc  # Save cursor position.
if cup:
    # tigetnum('lines') doesn't always update promptly, hence this:
    height = struct.unpack('hhhh', ioctl(0, TIOCGWINSZ, '\000' * 8))[0]
    print tparm(cup, height - 1, 0)  # Move cursor to bottom.
print 'This is {under}underlined{normal}!'.format(under=underline,
                                                  normal=normal)
print rc  # Restore cursor position.

That was long and full of incomprehensible trash! Let's try it again, this time with Blessings::

from blessings import Terminal

term = Terminal()
with term.location(0, term.height - 1):
    print 'This is', term.underline('pretty!')

Much better.

What It Provides

Blessings provides just one top-level object: Terminal. Instantiating a Terminal figures out whether you're on a terminal at all and, if so, does any necessary terminal setup. After that, you can proceed to ask it all sorts of things about the terminal. Terminal terminal terminal.

print 'All your {t.red}base {t.underline}are belong to us{t.normal}'.format(t=term)

Simple capabilities of interest include...

• bold
• reverse
• underline
• no_underline (which turns off underlining)
• blink
• normal (which turns off everything, even colors)