Replacing curses with textual? #1412
Replies: 5 comments 6 replies
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I appreciate all the work Will has been putting into Textual, and it looks like it will be useful for many projects. However, Textual needs to own the application loop, and so does VisiData. It would be a large amount of work to replace curses, we would lose a lot of control over the display and input, and we'd be dependent on a library that is not stable/mature yet. What functionality of Textual data tables are you missing in VisiData? Or are you suggesting it in the same way that people propose that we rewrite VisiData in Rust? |
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My interest in this case is a little beyond the latest shiny thing. Curses itself is behind the latest capabilities you can use with recent terminal emulators. OK that is shiny... There are several things I expect Textual could help with:
I don't really know Textual very well. Would it be possible for Visidata and Textual to share the application loop? Can you hook into the application loop? I agree it can be painful to use something that isn't stable/mature yet. Also, they could lose funding in the future. Currently, it does feel like Will and company will be responsive to issues that are found. |
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A couple updates:
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To be honest, @saulpw, I don't know if this makes sense. For data parsing, VisiData 100% relies on 3rd party parsers, but the UI is made via custom curses. Textual appears to have nicely solved some difficult problems. I do think that Textual would allow someone to quickly come up with a VisiData alternative that looks pretty, but might not have the same power. That might provide for some competition for VisiData. |
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Sorry I don't have time tonight to really respond. I tried to answer your question is it just shiny or is there something useful here with my earlier comment. I think all of the items in that bullet list have usefulness to some extent. For example, having rows of differing heights would allow VisiData to show rows with multiple lines of data, but not waste screen space for rows that just have one line of data. This allows better packing of data on the screen. As a user I might see more data. Right now VisiData row height is per sheet not per row. That would be a useful feature. I agree Textual is just a pending piece of work, Will has tweeted a bunch of demos, but not actually released the code or documentation. Much of what I talk about is based on viewing the demos, and not using/coding working code, so I could be wrong. Also, does it make sense for VisiData is also a separate question. I think Textual might lower the bar for a competitive tool. I also agree that having a web version could have a much wider impact than any changes to the terminal version of VisiData. After first learning VisiData, I really wanted that interface everywhere I was viewing data on the web. |
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Any thoughts on replacing curses with https://github.com/Textualize/textual ?
Will McGugan has been doing a lot of work on displaying tables:
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