maya-py

Python bindings for maya — a C++26 TUI framework with flexbox layout, a SIMD cell-diff renderer, and an Elm-style runtime. maya-py gives you a dead-simple Python API for building styled terminal UIs and interactive apps.

import maya_py as maya
from maya_py import card, field, b, hr

maya.show(card(
    b("maya-py").fg("sky"),
    hr(20),
    field("Status", "Online", value_color="green"),
    field("Region", "us-east-1"),
    title="service",
))

That's the whole program. Strings are UI — no manual element wrapping.

Documentation

A full reference manual lives in docs/:

• Getting Started — install, first UI, first app.
• How It Works (Concepts) — the mental model: render pipeline, runtimes, performance, pitfalls.
• Text & Style — T, markup helpers, colors.
• Layout — col, row, card, field, hr, options.
• Apps — the App class, key bindings, state, the view.
• Widgets — 44 native renderers: charts, controls, agent UI, scrolling.
• Rendering — show, to_string, animate, run.
• Performance — memo, the boundary tax, benchmarks.
• API Reference — every public symbol.
• Low-Level API — primitives and the native binding.
• Distribution — standalone wheels for old machines.

The 30-second tour

Text: just style strings

from maya_py import T, b, i, dim_text, c

b("bold")                 # bold
T("hi").bold.fg("sky")     # fluent chain
c("warn", "orange")        # colored
T("x").bg("red").fg("white")

Colors accept names ("red", "sky", "gold"), hex ("#ff8800", "#f80"), tuples ((255, 128, 0)), or ints (0xFF8800).

Layout: stacks that take bare strings

from maya_py import col, row, card, field, hr

col("top", "middle", "bottom")          # vertical
row("left", "right", gap=2)             # horizontal
card("body", title="hi", pad=1)          # bordered box
field("Name", "Ada")                     # "Name: Ada"
hr(40)                                   # horizontal rule

col / row / card accept the full maya flexbox surface as keywords:

• box model: pad, margin, gap (int or 1/2/4-tuples)
• border: border ("round"/"double"/"bold"/"dashed"/...), border_color, border_sides=sides(top=..., left=...), title, and positioned border_text=("Title", Top, Center) / border_text_end
• sizing: width, height, min_width/max_width, min_height/max_height — each takes an int (cells), "50%", a float like 0.5, "auto", or pct(50)/cells(20)/auto()
• flex: grow, shrink, basis, align, align_self, justify, wrap ("wrap"/"nowrap"/"reverse"), overflow ("hidden"/"scroll")
• style: bg, fg, style=maya.style(...)

Full layout power

Everything maya C++ can express, the Python API can too:

from maya_py import T, col, row, card, center, stack, grow, component, pct, cells, sides

# percent widths + a flex child that fills the rest
row(
    card("nav", width=pct(30), title="sidebar"),
    grow(card("main content", title="body")),   # expands to fill
    gap=1,
)

# center anything in a region
center("ready", width=cells(20), height=5, border="round")

# z-stack: layers paint on top; the first sets the size
stack(card("  panel  ", height=6), T("NEW").fg("red").bold)

# partial borders
card("footer", border_sides=sides(top=True, right=False, bottom=False, left=False))

# a size-aware widget — render_fn(width, height) draws to fit its box
def bar(w, h):
    filled = int(w * 0.4)
    return T("█" * filled + "░" * (w - filled)).fg("green")
col("Loading", component(bar, height=1))

Widgets: maya's native renderers

maya ships a library of ready-made widgets — they render through the same C++ renderer maya uses, then drop straight into any layout:

from maya_py import col, row, sparkline, gauge, progress, badge, table, bar_chart

col(
    sparkline([3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 9, 2, 6], label="req/s", color="sky", show_last=True),
    gauge(0.72, "load", style="bar"),            # "arc" or "bar"
    progress(0.55, "build", width=24, fill="lime"),
    row(badge("PASS", kind="success"), badge("SKIP", kind="warning"), gap=1),
    table(["Name", ("Score", 0, "right")],       # (header, width, align)
          [["Ada", 99], ["Bob", 7]], bordered=True, title="top"),
    bar_chart([("jan", 4), ("feb", 9), ("mar", 6)]),
    gap=1,
)

Available — every color argument takes a name / (r,g,b) / "#rrggbb" / Color, same as everywhere else:

• charts & meters: sparkline, gauge, progress, bar_chart, line_chart, heatmap, flame_chart, waterfall
• controls (rendered in any state — pass checked/on/selected/cursor): checkbox, toggle, radio, select, slider, button
• text & labels: badge, divider, spinner, callout, status_banner, breadcrumb, tabs, gradient, link, title_chip, model_badge, file_ref, markdown
• structure & nav: table, tree, list_view, menu, disclosure, key_help, calendar, timeline, picker (bordered command palette)
• agent UI: thinking, todo_list, toast, inline_diff
• graphics: image (1-bit braille), canvas (color half-block grid), Canvas (imperative drawing surface: set_pixel/line/rect/fill)

from maya_py import col, row, checkbox, slider, todo_list, timeline, tree

col(
    checkbox("Ship it", checked=True),
    slider(0.6, "volume", width=24, fill="sky"),
    todo_list([("design", "completed"), ("build", "in_progress"), "test"],
              description="sprint", status="running"),
    timeline([("clone", "", "0.4s", "completed"),
              ("compile", "", "", "in_progress", 8)]),
    tree({"label": "src", "expanded": True,
          "children": [{"label": "main.py"}, {"label": "util.py"}]}),
    gap=1,
)

List/tuple inputs are flexible: list items accept "str", (label, description, icon), or {...} dicts; timeline/todo statuses accept strings ("completed", "in_progress", ...) or the exported enums (TaskStatus, TodoItemStatus, ToastLevel, ButtonVariant).

Scrolling: viewport + scrollbar

Clip tall/wide content to a window and pair it with a live scrollbar. Scrolling just works with no handler code — exactly like maya, the run loop auto-forwards ↑↓ / PgUp / PgDn / Home / End and the mouse wheel + scrollbar drag to every on-screen scroll state:

from maya_py import App, col, row, T, scroll_state, viewport, scrollbar

app = App("log", mouse=True)            # mouse=True for wheel + thumb drag
s = scroll_state()                      # auto-dispatch on (the maya default)
app.state(s=s)
content = col(*[T(f"line {i}") for i in range(200)])

@app.on("q", "esc")
def quit(st): app.stop()

@app.view
def view(st):
    return row(
        viewport(content, st.s, height=14, grow=1),   # 14-row window, fills width
        scrollbar(st.s, 14, style="neon", thumb_color="sky"),
        gap=1,
    )

app.run()

That's the whole thing — no scroll handler. viewport(content, state, width=, height=, grow=) clips + scrolls (0 on an axis = fill; grow=1 expands to fill its row/column so a sibling scrollbar pins to the edge). scrollbar(state, size, axis="y"|"x", style=, thumb_color=, track_color=) draws the bar; style is a preset name — line, block, slim, heavy, double, dotted, dashed, braille, ascii, shadow, minimal, neon, retro, danger, pixel. The ScrollState exposes x/y/max_x/max_y, scroll_by, scroll_to, scroll_to_top/bottom, at_top()/at_bottom(), and viewport_bounds (the painted rect, for click hit-testing).

Need custom routing (several independent scroll regions)? Set state.auto_dispatch = False and call scroll_handle(state, ev) yourself inside @app.on_key / @app.on_mouse. Don't do both — that double-scrolls.

Apps: a class with decorators, no event loop

from maya_py import App, card, b

app = App("counter", n=0, quit_keys=("q", "esc"))   # state + quit in the constructor

@app.on("+", "=")
def inc(s): s.n += 1

@app.on("-")
def dec(s): s.n -= 1

@app.view
def view(s):
    return card(b(f"Count: {s.n}").fg("sky"), title="counter")

app.run()

Key names: single chars ("q", "+"), "up"/"down"/"left"/"right", "enter", "esc", "space", "tab", "ctrl+c", "alt+x", etc. Handlers get the state object; the view re-renders every frame.

Text input

Real interactive Input widgets — type into them, Tab between them, read .value. Register them with app.focus(...) and drop them in the view:

from maya_py import App, text_input, col

app = App("search")
query = text_input("type to filter…")
app.focus(query)

@app.view
def view(s):
    return col(query, f"searching: {query.value}")

app.run()

text_input(password=True) masks, textarea() is multi-line. @query.on_submit fires on Enter. An animation tick is @app.on_frame def tick(s, dt): ....

Mouse: clicks, scroll, drag

Decorate handlers for mouse input — registering any of them auto-enables mouse reporting (no mouse=True needed):

from maya_py import App, card

app = App("clicker")
app.state(hits=0, pos=(0, 0))

@app.on_click("left")          # "left" / "right" / "middle" / "any"
def click(s, col, row):        # col, row are 1-based screen cells
    s.hits += 1
    s.pos = (col, row)

@app.on_scroll
def scroll(s, direction):      # -1 up, +1 down
    s.hits += direction

@app.on_mouse
def any_mouse(s, ev):          # every mouse event (press/release/move/scroll)
    ...

@app.on("q", "esc")
def quit(s): app.stop()

@app.view
def view(s):
    return card(f"clicks {s.hits}  at {s.pos}", title="clicker")

app.run()

Low-level predicates work on any event too: mouse_clicked(ev, button), mouse_released(ev), mouse_moved(ev), scrolled_up/down(ev), mouse_pos(ev) -> (col, row) | None, mouse_button(ev), mouse_kind(ev), is_mouse(ev). Mouse needs a terminal that reports it (xterm, kitty, iTerm2, Windows Terminal, or tmux with set -g mouse on).

Animation

import maya_py as maya
from maya_py import animate, card

frames = "⠋⠙⠹⠸⠼⠴⠦⠧⠇⠏"
n = 0
def render(dt):
    global n; n += 1
    return card(frames[n % len(frames)] + " working")
animate(render, fps=30)   # maya.quit() to stop

Examples

Every maya C++ example is ported 1:1 to Python — 34 of them, plus extras. Most are full apps you can drive; run any with PYTHONPATH=src python examples/NAME.py. A headless examples/smoke_all.py renders one frame of each (CI-friendly, no TTY needed).

Games & toys (half-block pixel rendering via examples/_halfblock.py):

• snake.py — playable Snake (arrow keys / WASD).
• breakout.py — Breakout/Arkanoid with bricks, comet trail, particles.
• life.py — Conway's Game of Life with heat-aging palettes + patterns.
• sorts.py — five sorting algorithms racing side by side.
• maze.py — watch a maze carve itself (recursive backtracker) then a BFS flood-solve it; click to set the start cell, right-click the goal.

Graphics & sims (animate / App render loops):

• doom_fire.py — the classic Doom fire effect, 3 palettes.
• fluid.py — advection fluid / plasma with curl-noise velocity.
• particles.py — a gravity particle fountain.
• space.py — warp-speed starfield. space3d.py — rotating 3D wireframes.
• raymarch.py — a real-time raymarched SDF scene (sphere + plane).
• fps.py — a Wolfenstein-style textured raycaster with a minimap.
• mandelbrot.py — a zooming coloured Mandelbrot. matrix.py — digital rain.
• canvas.py — the Canvas drawing surface: lines, rects, a live plot.
• clock.py — a live analog clock drawn on the Canvas (hands, ticks, arc).
• gravity.py — an n-body gravity sandbox; mouse-hover crosshair, click to spawn an orbiting burst at the exact pixel.
• boids.py — Reynolds flocking; the mouse leads or scatters the flock (precise, viewport-bounds hit-testing — no hardcoded offsets).

Dashboards & data:

• dashboard.py — full-power layout (sidebar, z-stack, size-aware bars).
• sysmon.py — live system monitor (sparklines, gauges, log feed).
• stocks.py — stock ticker with sparklines + a gainers board.
• spectrum.py — a faux audio spectrum analyzer. music.py — a player UI.
• hacker.py — a "hollywood hacker" terminal of fake breaches.

Apps & agent UI:

• deploy.py — a CI/CD pipeline dashboard with a live stage timeline.
• chat.py — a chat client with bubbles + typing indicator.
• messenger.py — multi-channel chat with unread badges + a composer.
• ide.py — a VS Code / Zed-style mini IDE (tree, tabs, diagnostics, git).
• agent.py / agent_session.py — Claude-Code-style agent sessions: thinking → tool cards → todo plan → streaming markdown answer.
• widgets.py — one-shot widget showcase. widgets_gallery.py — live version.
• markup.py — a GFM markdown render that flows into scrollback (pipe to less -R).
• inline_progress.py — inline print + live (no alt-screen takeover).

Primitives & basics:

• hello.py static card · counter.py / stopwatch.py / todo.py App basics · paint.py mouse painter · live_spinner.py inline animation.
• scroll.py / scroll_clip.py / scroll_2d.py / scroll_slice.py / scroll_styles.py — every scrolling pattern (clip, two-axis, million-row slice, and all 15 scrollbar styles).

Run any of them:

PYTHONPATH=src python examples/agent_session.py

Install

The wheels are standalone — no compiler needed. maya-py ships precompiled binary wheels for CPython 3.9–3.14 on Linux (x86_64 + aarch64), macOS (universal2 — Apple Silicon and Intel in one wheel, macOS 11+), and Windows (x64), so on a normal machine you just:

pip install maya-py

That's it — the wheel already contains the compiled extension, and pip picks the right one for your OS / architecture / Python automatically.

Terminal note. maya speaks ANSI/VT escapes + truecolor + UTF-8. On Linux and macOS any modern terminal works. On Windows use Windows Terminal (the default on Windows 11; free on Windows 10) or any VT-capable host — the legacy cmd.exe console works too (maya enables ENABLE_VIRTUAL_TERMINAL_PROCESSING on startup), but Windows Terminal gives the best Unicode + color fidelity.

pip install --find-links \
  https://github.com/1ay1/maya-py/releases/expanded_assets/v0.2.1 \
  maya-py

# e.g. CPython 3.13 on x86_64 Linux
pip install https://github.com/1ay1/maya-py/releases/download/v0.2.1/maya_py-0.2.1-cp313-cp313-manylinux_2_28_x86_64.whl

The Linux wheel works even on machines with a very old C++ toolchain (or none at all), because:

• the wheel is built inside a manylinux_2_28 container, so it targets glibc 2.28 (2019) and runs on that-or-newer distros;
• it statically links libstdc++/libgcc, so it doesn't need the host's (old) C++ runtime — it depends only on baseline libc/libm.

The macOS wheel targets macOS 11.0+ and uses the system libc++; the Windows wheel links the UCRT present on every Windows 10+ machine. Nothing on your machine is compiled at install time, so your system compiler is irrelevant.

No matching wheel? Build from the sdist

If no prebuilt wheel matches your platform/Python, install the source distribution — this compiles the extension locally and needs a C++23-capable toolchain and CMake ≥ 3.28:

• Linux: GCC ≥ 14 or Clang ≥ 18
• macOS: AppleClang ≥ 15 (Xcode 15 — xcode-select --install)
• Windows: Visual Studio 2022 ≥ 17.10 (MSVC cl ≥ 19.40), "Desktop development with C++" workload

pip install \
  https://github.com/1ay1/maya-py/releases/download/v0.2.1/maya_py-0.2.1.tar.gz

The compile pulls maya in via CMake FetchContent and takes ~1–2 minutes (it builds maya from source). If your compiler is too old, the build aborts early with a clear, actionable message rather than a wall of template errors.

Development build

To hack on maya-py, build the extension in place (uses a sibling ../maya-src checkout if present, else clones maya):

cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build -j
cp build/_maya*.so src/maya_py/
PYTHONPATH=src python examples/hello.py

Wheels are produced by cibuildwheel via .github/workflows/wheels.yml — push a vX.Y.Z tag to build them and attach them to a GitHub Release automatically.

Low-level API

The friendly layer above is built on a thin primitive surface. You rarely need it, but it's there when you want raw control. box/text take explicit Style/Color objects:

maya.box(
    maya.text("Hello", maya.bold | maya.fg(255, 128, 0)),
    border=maya.Round, padding=1,
)

• text(content, style=None, wrap=...), box(*children, **opts), vstack/hstack/zstack, center, blank(), nothing().
• box opts mirror maya's BoxBuilder 1:1: direction, wrap, gap, padding, margin, border, border_color, border_sides, border_text, border_text_end, bg, fg, style, overflow, grow, shrink, basis, align, align_self, justify, and width/height/min_*/max_* (each accepts an int, "50%", "auto", or a Dimension).
• component(fn, grow=..., width=..., height=...) — a lazy element whose fn(width, height) runs once layout allocates a size and returns the tree to fill it.
• scroll_state(), viewport(content, state, width=, height=), scrollbar(state, size, axis=, style=), scroll_handle(state, ev) — the scrollable-window + scrollbar pair (maya's ScrollState + scrollbar_y/x).
• Styles compose with |: maya.bold | maya.fg(255, 128, 0), or maya.style(fg=(80,220,120), bold=True).
• render_to_string(element, width=80), print(element), live(render_fn, fps=30), run(event_fn, render_fn, ...).
• Event predicates: key(ev, "q"), key_special(ev, SpecialKey.Up), ctrl(ev, "c"), alt(ev, "x"), any_key(ev), resized(ev).

Notes

maya's compile-time DSL (t<"...">, type-state pipes) is resolved by the C++ compiler and can't cross the Python boundary, so maya-py routes everything through maya's equivalent runtime builders. The element trees produced are identical — anything the DSL can express, the runtime API can too.

The widget functions wrap maya's own widget classes (Sparkline, Gauge, Table, ...) and return the Element they build, so what you see is maya's native rendering, not a Python reimplementation. Interactive controls that need maya's Program runtime + focus + signals (Input, TextArea, full List/Tree navigation) aren't wrapped — drive interactivity from the App class instead.

Performance

Honest numbers from examples/bench.py and examples/bench_live.py (30-row dashboard, this machine — yours will differ):

Rendering to a string (one-shot output). Here a tuned pure-Python renderer still edges ahead — building the element tree in Python and crossing pybind11 costs more than maya's native render saves:

~80% of maya-py's time is the Python tree construction + boundary crossing, not maya — the native render itself is only ~24 µs. So if you only render static output once, a pure-Python lib like Rich is still a touch faster (now ~2×, down from ~5×).

Live redraw to a terminal (what maya is built for). When you redraw a frame and only part changed, maya's SIMD cell-diff emits only the changed cells. A string renderer must re-emit the whole frame:

maya writes ~11× fewer bytes to the terminal. On a real tty — especially over SSH or a slow connection — bytes-on-wire is the bottleneck, and this is a decisive win. This is the scenario maya was designed for.

Making it fast

Three levers close most of the Python-side gap:

1. Fluent styling is free. T("x").bold.fg("sky") accumulates state in pure Python and makes a single boundary crossing when the element is built (4.8× faster than the naive one-call-per-.bold approach).

2. Pass styled cells as tuples to skip the T objects. row/col accept (text, fg[, bg[, attrs]]) tuple specs directly — in a hot redraw path (tables, lists, dashboards) the throwaway T per cell is the dominant build cost, and the tuple form flattens the whole row in one boundary crossing. Byte-identical output, same API:

   from maya_py import row, T, c, DIM
   
   # reads nicer for one-off UI:
   row(T(name).fg("sky"), c(status, color), T(latency).dim, gap=2)
   # faster (tuple cells, zero T allocations — use in per-frame loops):
   row((name, "sky"), (status, color), (latency, None, None, DIM), gap=2)
   

   You can mix both, and any built Element / nested box / component child transparently falls back to the general path — so row(sidebar, grow(main)) still works. (trow/tcol are kept as back-compat aliases; new code can just use row/col.)

3. memo caches unchanged sub-trees. In a live app, wrap builders whose inputs rarely change — the hot frame then does no Python tree construction, just maya's native diff:

   from maya_py import memo, card, col, b
   
   @memo
   def header(title, count):     # rebuilt only when title/count change
       return card(b(title), f"{count} items")
   
   def view(s):
       return col(header(s.title, len(s.items)), body(s))
   

Bottom line: building a UI in Python always costs Python calls, but the thing that actually matters in a terminal — the per-frame redraw — is now faster than a hand-tuned pure-Python renderer: maya's native layout + paint renders the cached tree in ~25µs vs ~70µs for the bespoke string-builder in examples/bench.py, while still doing real flexbox, wrapping, and a partial-frame diff. memo + tuple-cell row/col let the steady-state frame skip Python almost entirely.

License

MIT (same as maya).