Much like Norton Guide readers or the 5x5 puzzle, code that has fun with the Mandelbrot set is another one of my goto exercises. I've written versions in many languages, and messed with plots in some different environments, as varied as in VR on the web to wearable items.

Back in the early days of my involvement with Textualize I wrote a deliberately worst-approach version using that framework. The whole thing was about taking a really silly approach while also stress-testing Textual itself. It did the job.

Later on I did a second version that targets Textual. This time it did a better job and was the catalyst for building textual-canvas. This version was intended more to be a widget that happened to come with an example application, and while it was far more better than the on-purpose-terrible version mentioned above, I still wasn't 100% happy with the way it worked.

Recently I did some maintenance work on textual-canvas, cleaning up the repository and bringing it in line with how I like to maintain my Python projects these days, and this prompted me to look back at textual-mandelbrot and rework it too. Quickly I realised it wasn't really sensible to rewrite it in a way that it would be backward compatible (not that I think anyone has ever used the widget) and instead I decided to kick off a fresh stand-alone application.

Complexitty is the result.

Right now the application has all the same features as the mandelexp application that came with textual-mandelbrot, plus a couple more. Also it's built on top of the common core library I've been putting together for all my own terminal-based Python applications. As time goes on I'll add more features.

As with most of my recent TUI-based projects, the application is built with comprehensive help for commands and key bindings.

and there's also a command palette that helps you discover (and run) commands and their keyboard bindings.

Complexitty is licensed GPL-3.0 and available via GitHub and also via PyPI. If you have an environment that has pipx installed you should be able to get up and going with:

pipx install complexitty

It can also be installed with Homebrew by tapping davep/homebrew and then installing complexitty:

brew tap davep/homebrew
brew install complexitty

I don't think I've mentioned it before on this blog, but some time back I decided it would be fun to use Textual to write a Mandelbrot explorer (simple Mandelbrot explorers have been another one of my favourite known problem to try an unknown thing problems). Doing it in the terminal seemed like a fun little hack. I started off with creating textual-canvas and then built textual-mandelbrot on top of that.

Not too long back I added a "command palette" to Textual (I'd prefer to call it a minibuffer, but I get that that's not fashionable these days), but so far I've not used it in any of my own projects; earlier today I thought it could be fun to add it to textual-mandelbrot.

Most of the commands I've added are trivial and really better covered by (and are covered by) keystrokes, but it was a good test and a way to show off how to create a command provider.

Having started this I can see some more useful things to add: for example it might be interesting to add a facility where you can bookmark a specific location, zoom level, iteration value, etc, and revisit later. The command palette would feel like a great way to pull back those bookmarks.

What I really liked though was how easy this was to do. The code to make the commands available is pretty trivial and, I believe, easy to follow. Although I do say so myself I think I managed to design a very accessible API for this.

There's more I'd like to add to that (the Textual command palette itself, I mean), of course; this was just the start. Support for commands that accept and prompt for arguments would be a neat and obvious enhancement (especially if done in a way that's reminiscent of how commands could be defined in CLIM -- I remember really liking how you could create self-documenting and self-completing commands in that).

All in good time...