termpixels 0.0.6

Terminal I/O with a pixel-like abstraction

termpixels

the terminal as a character-cell matrix

Get it

This project is on PyPI.

Alternatively, just pip install -e . in the root directory.

Purpose

Creating programs that run inside of terminals seems convoluted. The goal of termpixels is to abstract the terminal into a 2D array of "pixels", or character cells, which each contain a single text character, a foreground color, and a background color. termpixels allows you to modify the screen contents anywhere, at any time, and then handles updating the terminal automatically.

Limitations

There are lots of great libraries for coloring terminal output. This one is designed for full-screen applications that completely control the contents of the screen. That means that it automatically saves and clears the screen, resets the cursor position, and accepts input in cbreak mode.

Demo

from termpixels.app import App
from termpixels.color import Color
from time import time
from math import sin

class FunTextApp(App):
    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__()

    def on_frame(self):
        self.screen.clear()                           # remove everything from the screen
        text = "Hello world, from termpixels!"

        for i, c in enumerate(text):
            f = i / len(text)
            color = Color.hsl(f + time(), 1, 0.5)     # create a color from a hue value
            x = self.screen.w // 2 - len(text) // 2   # horizontally center the text
            offset = sin(time() * 3 + f * 5) * 2      # some arbitrary math
            y = round(self.screen.h / 2 + offset)     # vertical center with an offset
            self.screen.print(c, x + i, y, fg=color)  # draw the text to the screen buffer

        self.screen.update()                          # commit the changes to the screen

if __name__ == "__main__":
    FunTextApp().start()

Features

• Unix terminal feature detection with terminfo (via Python curses)
• Windows support through Win32 Console API
• Terminal (re)size detection
• Asynchronous input
  • Keyboard input with support for special keys like arrows, function keys, escape, etc.
  • Mouse click and move input in terminals supporting xterm mouse
• 16, 256, and true color output (with detection for best supported mode)
• No reliance on ncurses except for terminfo lookup
• 100% Python
• and more

Inspiration

• tcell
• ncurses