InquirerPrompt

🍴 Community-Maintained Fork

This is a community fork of kazhala/InquirerPy, maintained at tobiashochguertel/InquirerPrompt.

The original project is a fantastic library that we rely on and deeply appreciate. Unfortunately the upstream has been quiet for some time, and the community has accumulated valuable bug fixes, compatibility updates, and feature contributions that have not been reviewed or merged. Rather than letting those improvements go to waste, we decided to maintain this fork so that InquirerPrompt stays healthy and up-to-date for everyone.

Our goal is to contribute all improvements back upstream — if the original author becomes active again we will happily defer to them. Until then, we are keeping the lights on here. 🙏

Item	Detail
Upstream	kazhala/InquirerPy @ 0.3.4 (last commit Nov 2022)
This fork	tobiashochguertel/InquirerPrompt
Install	pip install InquirerPrompt (import: import InquirerPrompt)
Docs	InquirerPrompt.readthedocs.io

If you are the original author and would like to resume ownership or collaborate, please open an issue — we would love to work together!

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Documentation: InquirerPrompt.readthedocs.io

Introduction

InquirerPy is a Python port of the famous Inquirer.js (A collection of common interactive command line user interfaces). This project is a re-implementation of the PyInquirer project, with bug fixes of known issues, new prompts, backward compatible APIs as well as more customisation options.

Motivation

PyInquirer is a great Python port of Inquirer.js, however, the project is slowly reaching to an unmaintained state with various issues left behind and no intention to implement more feature requests. I was heavily relying on this library for other projects but could not proceed due to the limitations.

Some noticeable ones that bother me the most:

• hard limit on prompt_toolkit version 1.0.3
• various color issues
• various cursor issues
• No options for VI/Emacs navigation key bindings
• Pagination option doesn't work

This project uses python3.7+ type hinting with focus on resolving above issues while providing greater customisation options.

Requirements

OS

Leveraging prompt_toolkit, InquirerPy works cross platform for all OS. Although Unix platform may have a better experience than Windows.

Python

python >= 3.10

Getting Started

Checkout full documentation here.

Install

pip3 install InquirerPrompt

Quick Start

Classic Syntax (PyInquirer)

from InquirerPrompt import prompt

questions = [
    {"type": "input", "message": "What's your name:", "name": "name"},
    {"type": "confirm", "message": "Confirm?", "name": "confirm"},
]
result = prompt(questions)
name = result["name"]
confirm = result["confirm"]

Alternate Syntax

from InquirerPrompt import inquirer

name = inquirer.text(message="What's your name:").execute()
confirm = inquirer.confirm(message="Confirm?").execute()

Colored Choices

Choice names support prompt_toolkit formatted text objects (HTML, ANSI, FormattedText) for per-choice coloring. This works in all list-type prompts: select, checkbox, rawlist, expand, and fuzzy.

from prompt_toolkit.formatted_text import HTML
from InquirerPrompt import inquirer
from InquirerPrompt.base.control import Choice

result = inquirer.select(
    message="Select a shell:",
    choices=[
        Choice("zsh", name=HTML("<ansibrightcyan>Zsh</ansibrightcyan>  <ansigreen>Search: ✓</ansigreen>  <ansigreen>AI: ✓</ansigreen>")),
        Choice("bash", name=HTML("<ansibrightcyan>Bash</ansibrightcyan>  <ansigreen>Search: ✓</ansigreen>  <ansigreen>AI: ✓</ansigreen>")),
        Choice("fish", name=HTML("<ansibrightcyan>Fish</ansibrightcyan>  <ansired>Search: ✗</ansired>  <ansired>AI: ✗</ansired>")),
    ],
    border=True,
).execute()

ANSI escape codes are also supported via prompt_toolkit.formatted_text.ANSI:

from prompt_toolkit.formatted_text import ANSI

Choice("red", name=ANSI("\033[31m● Red\033[0m"))

Plain string choice names work as before — this feature is fully backward compatible.

See the Style documentation for available color classes and the examples/colored_choices.py demo script.

Rich Renderables

With the optional rich extra, rich_to_ansi renders rich renderables (or strings containing rich markup) into prompt_toolkit formatted text, usable anywhere formatted text is accepted — including choice names:

pip install "InquirerPrompt[rich]"

from rich.text import Text

from InquirerPrompt import inquirer
from InquirerPrompt.base.control import Choice
from InquirerPrompt.utils import rich_to_ansi

result = inquirer.select(
    message="Select a status:",
    choices=[
        Choice("ok", name=rich_to_ansi("[bold green]✓ OK[/bold green]")),
        Choice("warn", name=rich_to_ansi("[bold yellow]⚠ Warning[/bold yellow]")),
        Choice("err", name=rich_to_ansi("[bold red]✗ Error[/bold red]")),
        Choice("zsh", name=rich_to_ansi(Text("zsh", style="bright_cyan"))),
    ],
    border=True,
).execute()

Keep choice names single-line (or pass width) when using rich renderables as choice names.

See the rich renderables documentation and the examples/rich_choices.py demo script.

Preview Prompt

select prompts can display a live preview pane for the highlighted choice. The preview callable receives the choice value and may return a plain string, a prompt_toolkit formatted text object, or a rich renderable (with the InquirerPrompt[rich] extra):

from rich.panel import Panel

from InquirerPrompt import inquirer


def render_preview(value):
    return Panel(f"Details for {value}", border_style="green")


result = inquirer.preview(
    message="Select an option:",
    choices=["one", "two", "three"],
    preview=render_preview,
    preview_height=7,
).execute()

See the preview documentation and the examples/alternate/preview.py demo script.

Open in Editor

text prompts support open_in_editor=True so the user can switch to their default editor with the standard prompt_toolkit shortcuts (C-x C-e in Emacs mode, v in Vi navigation mode). This is especially useful for long, multi-line answers:

from InquirerPrompt import inquirer

result = inquirer.text(
    message="Enter your notes:",
    multiline=True,
    open_in_editor=True,
    tempfile_suffix=".md",
).execute()

Use tempfile_suffix to give the temporary editor file a useful extension (e.g. ".md" or ".py").

Erase When Done

All list-type prompts (select, checkbox, rawlist, expand, fuzzy, number) accept an erase_when_done parameter. When True, the prompt UI is erased from the terminal after the user answers — useful when prompts are used in a loop to avoid ghost lines accumulating.

from InquirerPrompt import inquirer

result = inquirer.select(
    message="Pick one:",
    choices=["a", "b", "c"],
    erase_when_done=True,
).execute()
# Terminal output is clean — no prompt artifacts left behind

Migrating from PyInquirer

Most APIs from PyInquirer should be compatible with InquirerPy. If you have discovered more incompatible APIs, please create an issue or directly update README via a pull request.

EditorPrompt

text prompts support an open_in_editor=True option that opens the user's default editor from within the input prompt. The temporary file is written with the current buffer and $EDITOR/$VISUAL is used to edit it. This covers the common use case of PyInquirer's editor type:

from InquirerPrompt import inquirer

result = inquirer.text(
    message="Enter notes:",
    multiline=True,
    open_in_editor=True,
    tempfile_suffix=".md",
).execute()

CheckboxPrompt

The following table contains the mapping of incompatible parameters.

PyInquirer	InquirerPy
pointer_sign	pointer
selected_sign	enabled_symbol
unselected_sign	disabled_symbol

Style

Every style keys from PyInquirer is present in InquirerPy except the ones in the following table.

PyInquirer	InquirerPy
selected	pointer

Although InquirerPy support all the keys from PyInquirer, the styling works slightly different. Please refer to the Style documentation for detailed information.

Similar projects

questionary

questionary is a fantastic fork which supports prompt_toolkit 3.0.0+ with performance improvement and more customisation options. It's already a well established and stable library.

Comparing with questionary, InquirerPy offers even more customisation options in styles, UI as well as key bindings. InquirerPy also provides a new and powerful fuzzy prompt.

python-inquirer

python-inquirer is another great Python port of Inquirer.js. Instead of using prompt_toolkit, it leverages the library blessed to implement the UI.

Before implementing InquirerPy, this library came up as an alternative. It's a more stable library comparing to the original PyInquirer, however it has a rather limited customisation options and an older UI which did not solve the issues I was facing described in the Motivation section.

Comparing with python-inquirer, InquirerPy offers a slightly better UI, more customisation options in key bindings and styles, providing pagination as well as more prompts.

Credit

This project is based on the great work done by the following projects & their authors.

• kazhala/InquirerPy — the original InquirerPy library by @kazhala. This fork exists solely because the upstream project has been inactive since 2022. All improvements here are intended to be contributed back upstream if the original author becomes active again. The MIT licence and original copyright are preserved in full.
• PyInquirer
• prompt_toolkit

License

This project is licensed under MIT.