console 0.98

Comprehensive, composable utility library for ANSI terminals. Better, stronger, faster. Tch-tch-tch-tch…

┌───────────────────────────┐
│   ┏━╸┏━┓┏┓╻┏━┓┏━┓╻  ┏━╸   │
│   ┃  ┃ ┃┃┗┫┗━┓┃ ┃┃  ┣╸    │
│   ┗━╸┗━┛╹ ╹┗━┛┗━┛┗━╸┗━╸   │
└───────────────────────────┘

Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1979…

╰─(˙𝀓˙)─╮ ╭─(＾0＾)─╯

Console

Testimonials

• “👍 Ayyyyyy… 👍”—The Fonz

• “DYN-O-MITE!!” — J.J. from Good Times

• “Better… Stronger… Faster”—Oscar Goldman

• “So hot, totally hot…”—Olivia Newton-John

• “There is nothing we won’t try…”—Laverne and Shirley

• “Fightin’ the system like a true modern day Robin Hood” —Waylon Jennings

Yet another package that makes it easy to generate the inline codes used to display colors and character styles in ANSI-compatible terminals and emulators, as well as other functionality such clearing screens, moving cursors, setting title bars, and detecting capabilities.

How is this one different? Well, it’s highly composable and more comprehensive than most. And how does it work? It’s a piece of cake.

“Piece of cake? Oh, I wish somebody would tell me what that means.” —Dr. Huer

␛[1;3m Hello World ␛[0m

There are a number of flexible ways to use console’s styling functionality. Most simply, adding a little color with console might look like this:

>>> from console import fg, bg, fx

>>> fg.green + 'Hello World!' + fg.default
'\x1b[32mHello World!\x1b[39m'

But wait!  There’s a shitload,^H^H^H^H^H, crapton,^H^H^H^H^H err… lot more!  Kindly read on.

FYI, the string '\x1b' represents the ASCII Escape character (27 in decimal, 1b hex). Command [32m turns the text green and [39m back to the default color. But, there’s no need to worry about any of that. That’s why you’re here, right?

Printing to a supporting terminal from Python might also look like this:

Note

Apologies, text below can’t be styled due to PyPI/github readme limitations. Try the Sphinx docs instead. When you see “😉” in a comment, that’s a reminder you’re not getting the full monty.

>>> print(fg.red, fx.italic, '♥ Heart', fx.end,
...       ' of Glass…', sep='')

♥ Heart of Glass…  # ← not styled due to PyPI limits 😉

Above, fx.end is a convenient object to note—it ends all styles and fore/background colors at once, where as bg.default for example, resets only the background to its default color. This need not be your responsibility however. One may use the call form instead, where it’s automatic:

fg.yellow('Far Out!')  # --> '\x1b[33mFar Out!\x1b[39m'

More on that later.

Installen-Sie, Bitte

⏵ pip3 install --user console

Suggested additional support packages, some of which may be installed automatically if needed:

webcolors             # Moar! color names
future_fstrings       # Needed: Python Version < 3.6

colorama              # Needed: Windows Version < 10
win_unicode_console   # Useful: for Win Python < 3.6

Jah! While console is cross-platform, colorama will need to be installed and .init() run beforehand to view these examples under the lame (no-ANSI support) versions of Windows < 10.

Note

console supports Python 3.6 and over by default. However! It is trying out “future-fstrings” for experimental support under Python versions 3.5 and 3.4, perhaps earlier. Keep an eye peeled for oddities under older Pythons. Sorry, neither 2.X or 1.X is supported.  :-P

Der console package has recently been tested on:

• Ubuntu 19.04 - Python 3.7

  • xterm, mate-terminal, linux, fbterm

• FreeBSD 11 - Python 3.7

• MacOS 10.13 - Python 3.6

  • Terminal.app, iTerm2

• Windows XP - Python 3.4 - 32 bit + colorama, ansicon

• Windows 7 - Python 3.6 - 32 bit + colorama

• Windows 10 - Python 3.7 - 64bit

  • Conhost, WSL

¸¸.·´¯`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸¸¸.·´¯`·.¸¸¸

Overview

“Hey, Mr. Kot-tair!”—Freddie “Boom Boom” Washington

As mentioned, console handles lots more than color and styles.

Utils Module

console.utils includes a number of nifty functions:

>>> from console.utils import cls, set_title

>>> cls()  # whammo! a.k.a. reset terminal
>>> set_title('Le Freak')  # c'est chic
'\x1b]2;Le Freak\x07'

It can also strip_ansi from strings, wait for keypresses, clear a line or the screen (with or without scrollback), print stylish progress bars, or easily pause a script like the old DOS commands of yesteryear.

Screen Module

With console.screen you can save or restore it, move the cursor around, get its position, and enable bracketed paste if any of that floats your boat. Blessings-compatible context managers are also available for full-screen fun.

>>> from console.screen import sc

>>> with sc.location(40, 20):
...     print('Hello, Woild.')

Detection Module

Detect the terminal environment with console.detection:

• Redirection—is this an interactive “tty” or not?

• Determine palette support

• Check relevant user preferences through environment variables, such as TERM, NO_COLOR, COLORFGBG, and CLICOLOR, etc.

• Query terminal colors and themes—light or dark?

• Get titles, cursor position, and more.

Console does its best to figure out what your terminal supports on startup and will configure its convenience objects (we imported above) to do the right thing. They will deactivate themselves automatically at startup when output is redirected into a pipe, for example.

Detection can be bypassed and handled manually when needed however. Simply use the detection functions in the module or write your own as desired, then create your own objects from the classes in the console.style and console.screen modules. (See the Environment Variables section for full probe deactivation.)

There’s also logging done—enable the debug level before loading the console package and you’ll see the results of the queries from the detection module.

Constants

A number of useful constants are provided in console.constants, such as CSI and OSC for building your own apps. You can:

from console.constants import BEL
print(f'Ring my {BEL}… Ring my {BEL}')  # ring-a-ling-a-ling…

Palettes

“Looo-king Gooood!”—Chico and the Man

The palettes break down into three main categories. Unleash your inner Britto below:

• Basic, the original 8/16 named colors

• Extended, a set of 256 indexed colors

• “True”, a.k.a. 16 million colors, consisting of:

  • RGB specified colors

  • X11-named colors, or

  • Webcolors-named colors

As mentioned, the original palette, X11, and Webcolor palettes may be accessed directly from a palette object by name. For example:

# Basic                Comment
fg.red                # One of the original 8 colors
fg.lightred           # Another 8 brighter colors w/o bold

# Truecolor variants
fg.bisque             # Webcolors or X11 color name, if avail
fg.navyblue           # Webcolors takes precedence, if installed

Specific palettes are selected via a prefix letter and a number of digits (or name) to specify the color. For example:

# Extended     Format  Comment
bg.i_123       iDDD   # Extended/indexed 256-color palette
bg.n_f0f       nHHH   # Hex to *nearest* indexed color

# Truecolor
bg.t_ff00bb    tHHH   # Truecolor, 3 or 6 digits
bg.x_navyblue  x_NM   # Force an X11 color name, if available
bg.w_bisque    w_NM   # Force Webcolors, if installed

The underscores are optional. Choose depending whether brevity or readability are more important to you.

The assorted true color forms are useful to choose one explicitly without ambiguity. X11 and Webcolors differ on a few obscure colors.

Note

Be aware, an unrecognized color name or index will result in an AttributeError.

Composability++

“East bound and down, loaded up and truckin’ We gonna do what they say can’t be done…”—Smokey and the Bandit

Console’s palette entry objects are meant to be highly composable and useful in multiple ways. For example, you might like to create your own compound styles to use over and over again.

They can also be called (remember?) as functions if desired and have “mixin” styles added in as well. The callable form also automatically resets styles to their defaults at the end of each line in the string (to avoid breaking pagers), so those tasks no longer need to be managed manually:

>>> muy_importante = fg.white + fx.bold + bg.red
>>> print(muy_importante('¡AHORITA!', fx.underline))  # ← mixin

¡AHORITA!  # ← not styled due to PyPI limits 😉

One nice feature—when palette objects are combined together as done above, the list of codes to be rendered to is kept on ice until final output as a string. Meaning, there won’t be redundant escape sequences in the output, no matter how many you add. No sirree! ↓

'\x1b[37;1;41;4m¡AHORITA!\x1b[0m'
# See  ^ ^ ^ ^

Styles can be built on the fly as well:

>>> print(
...   f'{fg.i208 + fx.reverse}Tangerine Dream{fx.end}',  # or
...     (fg.i208 + fx.reverse)('Tangerine Dream'),
... )
Tangerine Dream  # 😉

Templating

To build templates, call a palette entry with placeholder strings, with (or instead of) text:

>>> sam_template = bg.i22('{}')  # dark green
>>> print(sam_template.format(' GREEN Eggs… '))

GREEN Eggs…   # No, I do not like… 😉

Other template formats are no problem either, %s or ${}.

Performance

Outta Sight!

Console is lightweight, but perhaps you’d like a pre-rendered string to be used in a tight loop for performance reasons. Simply use str() to finalize the output then use it in the loop.

>>> msg = str(muy_importante('¡AHORITA!'))

>>> for i in range(100000000):
...     print(msg)  # rapidinho, por favor

Misc

Palette entries work as context-managers as well:

with bg.dodgerblue:
    print('Infield: Garvey, Lopes, Russel, Cey, Yeager')
    print('Outfield: Baker, Monday, Smith')
    print('Coach: Lasorda')

                            ⚾
¸¸.·´¯`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.⫽⫽¸¸.·´¯`·.¸¸¸.·´¯`·.¸¸¸
                          ⫻⫻    Tok!

Demos and Tests

“I got chills, they’re multiplyin’…”—Danny Zuko

A series of positively jaw-dropping demos (haha, ok maybe not) may be run at the command-line with:

⏵ python3 -m console.demos

If you have pytest installed, tests can be run from the install folder.

⏵ pytest -s

The Makefile in the repo at github has more details on such topics.

Contributions

“Use the Source, Luke!”—‘Ben’ Kenobi

Could use some help testing on Windows and MacOS as my daily driver is a 🐧 Tux racer. Can you help?

Legalese

“Stickin’ it to the Man”

• Copyright 2018-2019, Mike Miller

• Released under the LGPL, version 3+.

• Enterprise Pricing:

  6 MEEllion dollars… Bwah-haha-ha!

  (only have to sell one copy!)