I'm trying to make terminal user interface with python which I will use it as post installation script for min linux os. But I don't want to use ncurses or urwid because it feels like overkill. I'm looking more in whiptail or screen direction. But I don't know is it better to call ui terminal rendering from python subprocess or to use it with python bindings like pythondialog, here are the reasons for my doubts.
Is whiptail/screen available on every minimal linux image... subprocess should be better suited for my program.
pythondialog requires installation of python3-dialog package. Since I want to make a postinstallation program for linux min image I want to use dependencies as little as possible.
What would you suggest for my problem?
Maybe npyscreen is what you are looking for, but i havent tried it. It just installed for me in fresh 2.7 virtualenv with zero dependencies - EDIT: sorry no, it runs on top of ncurses.
I've had a similar notion about ncurses or urwid. You might want to try:
prompt toolkit - focus on UI, comes with tons of examples
asciimatics - handy for UI and animations, also with a bunch of helpful examples
Both have a responsive and active community.
Related
recently I have made a CLI program using Python and it uses a library called keyboard. The program is working very well but have something that hurts me...
For any reason when I start it in Windows works normally, but on Linux (probably on MacOS too) gives a error of permission. What i know about this library is that it captures the keys even when the terminal windows is inactive, maybe the Linux think this dangerous and ask for super user. I particularly don't care to get the user "keypressers" even when the terminal window is inactive (Only in active terminal is great for me)
then I looked for some libraries similar this one, but for any reason don't work pretty similar. the keyboard library has a function called is_pressed() that returns a boolean value based if a specific key is pressed, for example: if is_pressed('space'), but I didn't find a alternative library that have a similar function.
Assuming this is for a game, you might want to take a look at the pygame framework. It has an eventloop specifically for this kind of purpose. Docs here.
I'm looking for an equivalent Python library that will work when I run my script on Raspberry Pi. I'm under the impression that pywinauto only works on windows machine.
I want to control some inputs to a GUI launched by my script, using my script. Apart from pywinauto I have no idea how to do this. I thought about using command line to control the software directly, but if there is a simpler way I would really appreciate knowing about it.
Thanks for your time.
ATSPI is an Linux accessibility technology to obtain GUI text/rectangle properties programmatically. See how to find and run ATSPI registry daemon and how to enable ATSPI for the most popular types of GUI apps. Usually it's
$ /usr/libexec/at-spi-registryd &
There is a Python bindings for ATSPI. See this answer for details:
How to install pyatspi?
The pyatspi package has too many dependencies like pygobject etc. It also requires some compilation during installation steps. We think this is not user friendly so we decided to use libatspi.so directly (without any dependencies). This work status can be tracked here: https://github.com/pywinauto/pywinauto/pull/449
There is no exact deadline for pywinauto 0.7.0 with this feature (it's a hobby project), but I would say this summer sounds realistic.
I want to develop a small Python app that interacts with the user via the console/command line. Are there any good libraries I can use to get user input and display the output in a nice-looking way? I tried searching but most of what I found was command-line argument processing, didn't see anything about user interaction in the shell.
It should be crossplatform (Windows and Linux)
A really excellent library is cmd which is part of the python standard library. It is cross platform Windows, Linux, Mac. You just have to implement one class and it offers so many great features:
provides list of supported commands(they end up being implemented as methods)
help command that can be called to explain one of your commands
handles the whole entering a command, checking syntax, and calling your method command loop cycle.
users can save the commands they have run in an interactive session and run them as a script. check out the example below.
If you take the turtle shell example and save it as turtleshell.py and save the below turtle script file as circles.txt
circle 20
circle 50
circle 100
bye
then you could run the turtle script with the following command:
cat circles.txt | ./turtleshell.py
so in the simple example shown in the docs the developer has essentially made a simple mini-language that can be used as an easier interface to to the turtle module making it even easier to introduce programming to kids. The examples above have been taken from the python3 docs because they have included a detailed example in their docs which wasn't there in the 2.7 docs, but cmd is available and fully functional in python 2.3 and later.
You can control the Unix terminal with the curses library. The library essentially lets you build a simple terminal GUI.
If you need more, take a look at Urwid as well. Urwid offers more complex GUI widgets for the discerning terminal GUI developer. :-)
Curses is the most widely used in the Unix environment according to the doc. For Windows you could look at Windows Console Driver, WConio - Windows CONsole I/O for Python or Wcurses. I couldn't find much on cross platform console libraries unfortuntaly.
If your Windows users are CLI users they probably have cygwin which has ncurse support so curses is still the best option if you ask me.
Not sure if this is the location to ask this, so please close or move as appropriate.
We are bundling Python2.7 64-bit and a number of python libraries (GDAL, SciPy, Numpy) into an application (py2app / pyinstaller). I wonder if it is possible to create a stand alone terminal that has access to the installed libraries, but not the system libraries. This would be akin to FWTools.
The goal is to allow the user to open a command prompt within the GUI and have access to all of the libraries within the application a la a virtual environment.
For example, a user with GDAL 1.8 installed could download this application, launch a stand alone command line and utilize our build of gdal 1.9.1 from within the application.
Any references would be appreciated as we are just considering this approach and are unsure of the feasibility.
We are writing this in python.
There isn't a very easy way to embed a console / terminal into any of the GUI frameworks. The closest I've heard of is PyGTK's VteTerminal. You might be able to use Python's curses library, but I haven't been able to find any good ways to wrap that in a GUI either.
If all you want is a Python shell, you might be able to use wxPython's PyShell or PyCrust widgets. Those are pretty straight-forward.
I'm planning to take a non-GUI Linux distro (no Gnome, KDE, etc) and build my own front-end GUI for it. While I have a few years of Python programming experience, I have never attempted to do something quite like this.
To be more specific about my project, I'm building a CarPC and I have everything pretty much worked out so far, except the front-end. Most pre-existing front-ends for CarPCs run on Windows and the ones that run on Linux are hard to find (they either quit development or only run on specific hardware). My front-end will always be full-screen and I do not want to run a desktop environment unless I absolutely have to; it would just slow down the boot time and provide unnecessary features.
My question is basically where I should start. What Python graphics libraries are out there that would allow me to build a front-end GUI without a desktop environment?
You'll probably want to look at other answers and questions on this topic such as this one
Another good link is this one on the Python websitewhich lists different GUI toolkits.
While I haven't used it, Kivy looks like a good place to start. It's apparently got touch screen capabilities which I assume you would use and it doesn't look constrained to a GUI desktop env.
Hopefully you can find a way to do this without a desktop env. If not perhaps consider using X11 as your layer and go from there.
You should probably consider DirectFB. You can even use a DE on it if you like (although not required).
WxPython is awesome. I use it with Python and plain WxWidgets in C++ too. I've had great luck with making native GUIs from it and internationalization is supported too. Good luck!
Edit: I missed the "without a desktop environment bit". I'm not sure my answer is relevant. You should edit the Title of the question. Just disregard.