cmdgui

Simple terminal GUIs in Python. Draw your layout as text, fill in the widgets, and keep writing your program — the view runs on its own thread, so there's no event loop to hand control to and no draw calls to make.

┌─ name ───────────────────┐
│quinn                     │[         Greet          ] ON   fast
├─ fruit ──────────────────┼─ scores ──────────────────────────────────┐
│ apple                    │name      score  city                      │
│ banana                   │Ada       98     London                    │
│ cherry                   │Linus     87     Helsinki                  │
│                          ├─ log ─────────────────────────────────────┤
│                          │Hello, quinn! 👋                           │
│                          │picked cherry                              │
└──────────────────────────┴───────────────────────────────────────────┘
 ████████████████████████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  67%[ ] done

No dependencies. macOS and Linux; Windows support is written but untested.

Install

pip install cmdgui

Quick start

from cmdgui import View, Button, Stdout
import time

class App(View):
    layout = """
        start  pause  .
        log    -      -
    """
    start = Button("Start", on_click=lambda: print("started"))
    pause = Button("Pause", on_click=lambda: print("paused"))
    log = Stdout()

view = App()

for i in range(100):
    print(f"tick {i}")   # shows up in the log box
    time.sleep(0.5)

Press q to quit (or Ctrl+C). Because the widgets are class attributes, your editor knows view.start is a Button — autocomplete and type checking work.

What's in it

• Layouts drawn as text: each word is a grid cell, - and | stretch a widget across cells, and borders between neighbours join up. Panels group widgets, can be scrolled when they don't fit, and lines between widgets can be made draggable.
• Widgets: text, labels, buttons, one-line and multi-line text boxes (with password mode and history), checkboxes, toggles, radio buttons, dropdowns, sliders, progress bars, menus, folding trees, tables, a calendar and date picker, tabs, a log viewer with levels and search, a box that shows everything you print, a terminal that runs a shell or any program inside the layout, and a pixel canvas with lines, shapes and curves.
• Styled text: "[bold red]Error:[/] couldn't open [cyan]notes.txt[/]" in labels, buttons and text, and Markdown documents with Text(markdown=True).
• Text boxes that behave: select with the mouse or Shift, copy, cut and paste, pasting in one go, and dim hints before, after and ahead of the cursor for autocomplete.
• Inline views: draw in a few rows under the prompt instead of the whole screen, with printed text scrolling above.
• Popups: dialogs, dropdowns and command menus that float over the layout, and questions that wait for the answer: if view.confirm("Delete it?"): ..., and notifications in the corner: view.notify("Saved", "ok").
• Mouse and keyboard: clicks, dragging, the scroll wheel, right-click menus, Tab between widgets, your own key bindings, and a footer that shows the keys that work right now.
• Timers: view.every(1, tick) and view.after(5, fn), no threads needed.
• Forms: view.values is every input's value as a dict (panels nested inside), and setting it fills them back in, so saving settings is one json.dump.
• Progress from a loop: for f in view.bar.track(files): ... shows how many are done and how long is left.
• Themes: restyle any part, with 73 named colors, the 256-color palette, or exact hex colors.
• Your own widgets: subclass Widget, draw into a canvas, and it works in layouts.

Documentation

• Overview: ways to build a view, changing widgets, timers, running and quitting
• Layouts
• Widgets
• Popups
• Keys and focus
• Themes and colors
• Your own widgets

The examples folder has a widget demo, a dashboard, popups, dialogs that wait for an answer, tabs, a console, a file browser, pixel graphics, a log viewer with draggable lines, date pickers, a shell and a Python REPL side by side, a reader for these docs, a long form that scrolls, a settings form saved as JSON, progress bars driven by loops, and an inline progress display.