FlowUI

FlowUI is a simple presentation toolkit for text-based displays where it is not possible to move the cursor backwards. All widgets are designed so that they are rendered one character at a time and assuming the cursor is moved forward one character each time.

Originally FlowUI was developed as the presentation toolkit for (void)walker.

Requirements

FlowUI has been tested with Python 2.7 on MacOS X and GNU/Linux but it should work equally well on any terminal which supports ANSI escape codes.

Themes

Theme's are loosely based on the controls used by Vim color schemes. This makes it easier to port existing themes to FlowUI. A domain-specific language similar to the one used to defined lexers in Pygments is used to define a theme.

Format controls

Text is formatted by embedding certain keywords in the string before sending it to the Theme's or AnsiTerminal's write method. For instance, to format the statement "if a < 5:" on could write:

('%(face-statement)sif%(face-normal)s %(face-identifier)sa%(face-normal)s < '
 '%(face-constant)s5%(face-normal)s:')

As seen in this example formatting can become quite verbose so prefer wrapping it inside a widget which inserts the necessary keywords so that strings remain readable inside your core logic.

Typefaces

• Regular

  Default face

• Bold

• Italic

• Underline

Text faces

• face-normal

• face-comment

• face-constant

  string, char, number etc constants.

• face-identifier

  Variable/function name.

• face-statement

  Statements (if, else, for etc.)

• face-define

  Definitions (i.e. #define X.)

• face-type

  Types (integer, static, struct etc.)

• face-special

  Special symbols or characters.

• face-underlined

  Text that stands out (i.e. links.)

• face-error

• face-attention

  Anything that needs extra attention.

• face-header

  Section headers etc.

Widgets

FlowUI widgets inherit from the Widget class which serve to provide them with a basic API.

Containers

Containers are used to group widgets that belong to the same context.

• Section

  The section provides a divider with an optional headline. Padding is added in order to illustrate that components in side it belong to that section.

Tables

The table is a widget for structured data presentation. It is very similar to the table widget of HTML or as used by many spreadsheet tools. A table can consist of rows and or cells that are laid out in an orderly fashion on screen.

• Table

  The table widget acts mainly as a container for the rows and cells as well as wrapping the drawing methods for them.

• Row

  The row, as the name suggests, represents a single row in the table containing one or more cells.

• Cell

  The cell is the most basic building block of the Table and also the widget that contains the actual table content. Cells are contained either in a row or directly inside the table and the difference is in how they are drawn.

  Cells that are stored in rows are sized so that each column lines up vertically in every row. The size of each cell is calculated based on the maximum available table width and the size of each cell. If the cells of a row are too big to fit on one row they are broken up into multiple lines which are aligned within each column.

  Cells that are not stored in rows are all normalized to the same size and lined up vertically in the table as if they all belonged to a row consisting of the maximum number of cells that will fit on a row.

Terminal

Output from FlowUI passes to an instance of a Terminal object which is the abstraction that represents the terminal emulator. This can either be directly backed by an actual terminal emulator or wrap an interface which will eventually output to a terminal.

A terminal needs to provide at least the width, in characters, and the number of colors supported by the terminal in order for widgets to render properly.

FlowUI comes with one terminal implementation, SysTerminal, which uses sys.stdout.

AnsiTerminal is a decorator for the terminal object which attaches a theme to it while still providing the same interface as a Terminal.

Example

Here follows a short example showing how a matrix of data can be rendered into into a table.

def sample_table(term):
    data = [['#', 'Thickness', 'Temperature', 'Concentration'],
            [1, 2.1740228, 82, 0.066],
            [2, 1.8774501, 77, 0.071],
            [3, 1.8774704, 77, 0.072],
            [4, 1.9762727, 79, 0.069]]

    tbl = table.Table()
    for r in data:
        row = table.Row()
        for c in r:
            row.add_cell(table.Cell(c))

        tbl.add_row(row)

    experiment_section = Section('Experiment data')
    experiment_section.add_component(tbl)
    experiment_section.draw(term, term.width())

if __name__ == '__main__':
    ansi_terminal = AnsiTerminal(SysTerminal(), Solarized())
    sample_table(ansi_terminal)

Changelog

0.2.1

• Fixes invalid length calculation when using AnsiTerminal
• Fixes issue when writing percent sign (%%)

0.2.0

• Defines a domain-specific language for themes.
  • Breaks Python 3000 support in this release.
  • The new theme format makes it easier to write non-ANSI backends for FlowUI and for this reason ThemedTerminal has been renamed AnsiTerminal.

0.1.0

• Initial release

License

FlowUI is distributed under the 3-clause Revised BSD License. See LICENSE.md for the full license text.