uiblack

Streamlined cross-platform Textual UI.

Attractive console output should not be walled behind libCurses! It should not take dozens of lines just to describe ordinary things like menus or basic prompts. Lastly, attractive console applications should not be limited to only Linux & OSX.

Those are the guiding thoughts behind uiblack. A truly cross-platform, dead simple, concise library that handles several mundane development tasks all at once.

Installation

OS X, Linux & Windows:

pip install uiblack

Logging

To keep things simple and cross-platform, logs are generated in the execution directory. (This particular behavior may be subject to change in future builds.)

By default, [INFO] level messages are logged.

To update the logging level, please use the syslog values specified here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syslog#Severity_level

from uiblack.terminal import UIBlackTerminal

# If you want to specify logging parameters:

# Name of log file to be written in local directory (Only Alphanumeric chars permitted)
log_name = "yourprogram"

# Whether the log should be started anew upon each execution
restart_log = False

# 0 - 7 Conforms to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syslog#Severity_level
log_level = 4

ui = UIBlackTerminal(log_name, restart_log=restart_log, log_level=log_level)

Error handling

If you want to wrap a troublesome function or your entire program in a exception handler that correctly prints to the screen and logs, just add some "pie"!

This process:

• Catches all exceptions
• Formats them into a single line
• Keeps only the last segment of the traceback (the part we actually care about)
• Prints correctly to the virtual UIBlack console
• Logs the event WITH traceback in the log file under a single human-readable line

from uiblack.terminal import UIBlackTerminal

ui = UIBlackTerminal("yourprogram")

@ui.wrapper  # Notice the function is wrapped using "pie" syntax before each function
def troublesome_func():
    raise KeyError

@ui.wrapper
def some_other_func(param):
    raise ImportError

Console output

Syslog output

Dual Consoles

Starting in version 1.1.4 the terminal supports dual console output similar to GNU Screen or tmux.

The upper console is "a" the lower is "b". Address them with keywords appended to the end of the syslog display functions.

from uiblack.terminal import UIBlackTerminal

ui = UIBlackTerminal("yourprogram")

ui.debug("Debug text")
ui.notice("Info text console a", console="a")
ui.notice("Info text console b", console="b")
ui.error("error text")
ui.console("regular text console b", console="b")
ui.warn("This is a warning on console b", console="b")

Usage examples

Keep it simple. Just import, instance the library, and use it!

from uiblack.terminal import UIBlackTerminal

# Run with defaults works just fine if logging parameters do not need to be altered
ui = UIBlackTerminal("yourprogram")
ui.clear()

result = ui.input("This is the input question")
ui.print_center(result)

result = ui.ask_yn("This is the question")
ui.print_center(result)

for items in range(0, 5000, 2):
    ui.load_bar("This is the title of a bar", items, 5000)

ui.set_main_title("this is a test title")

result = ui.ask_list("Question text goes here",
                     ["first item here",
                      "this is the second item",
                      "and this is the third"],
                     )

ui.warn("warning here")
ui.error("error here")
ui.notice("Just a notice")

ui.console("this simulates regular print() command")
ui.console("And you can see, it scrolls output like the console.")

Performant

One major goal has remained from the start, remain performant. To that end, support for thread-safe operation is baked in. Additionally, various functions support "low_latency" mode. This mode causes the screen to be updated every N-number of iterations to prevent wasting cycles to display content.

Meta

Brandon Blackburn – PGP Encrypted Chat @ Keybase

Distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. See LICENSE for more information.

TL;DR: For a human-readable & fast explanation of the Apache 2.0 license visit: http://www.tldrlegal.com/l/apache2

https://github.com/BlackburnHax/uiblack