Tinboard v0.14.0

Posted on 2024-05-14 08:02 +0100 in Coding • Tagged with Python, terminal, textual, YouTube • 1 min read

I've just release Tinboard v0.14.0. This release adds a feature that a user requested, wheer you can set the default values for the privacy and read-later status of a new bookmark:

The application settings dialog

So, any time you create a new bookmark, the edit dialog will use those values by default. It's a feature that makes perfect sense but I didn't think to add it early on because... well, I set the defaults to my preference.

Tinboard can be installed with pip or (ideally) pipx from PyPi. It can also be installed with Homebrew by tapping davep/homebrew and then installing tinboard:

$ brew tap davep/homebrew
$ brew install tinboard

The source is available on GitHub.


Tinboard v0.12.0

Posted on 2024-04-18 16:46 +0100 in Coding • Tagged with Python, terminal, textual, YouTube • 2 min read

Tinboard has turned into a tool I use pretty much every day; it's probably my most-used Textual/Python-developed application at this point. This is causing me to think more and more about how I can add things to it that are related to the core purpose, but are also outside of the main "interface with Pinboard" thing.

A thing with keeping bookmarks for a long time is that some of them go stale, go away. Some will just plain 404, others the whole site will disappear. If I find myself going back to a bookmark and seeing this is the case, I'll hit the Wayback Machine and see if there's an archive there.

So I got to thinking: what if I add the ability to perform this check into Tinboard itself? So I did just that.

Now, in the application, if you press w with a bookmark highlighted, it will check with the Wayback Machine to see if the bookmark is in the archive. If it isn't you see this:

No archive result

On the other hand, if it is in the archive, you'll see something like this:

Is in the archive result

I sense this is going to be the first step in a couple of features related to this. I'm thinking that I may go on to add a "swap the URL for this bookmark with the Wayback Machine archive URL" feature, which will be handy for those bookmarks that have one away, and it would also be useful to look at the options for a "please archive a copy of this bookmark" feature.

But, for now, v0.12.0 is available and has this handy (for me anyway) first step.

Tinboard can be installed with pip or (ideally) pipx from PyPi. It can also be installed with Homebrew by tapping davep/homebrew and then installing tinboard:

$ brew tap davep/homebrew
$ brew install tinboard

The source is available on GitHub.


PISpy v0.6.0

Posted on 2024-04-17 11:30 +0100 in Coding • Tagged with Python, terminal, textual, YouTube • 1 min read

Back in the very early days of the Textual adventure, within the first month or so of working on the framework, we had a period of dogfooding. One of the projects I wrote during that time was a little tool I called PISpy.

The initial version was pretty much a quick hack; during that dogfooding period I did my best to try and develop a new project every couple of days. Since then I've let PISpy descend into bit rot.

In the last week or so I've turned my attention back to it and made an effort to tidy up the code, tidy it some more, and some more, and even some more.

This morning I put the finishing touches to these changes and released v0.6.0.

PISpy in action

PISpy can be installed with pip or (ideallty) pipx from PyPI. It can also be installed with Homebrew by tapping davep/homebrew and then installing pispy:

$ brew tap davep/homebrew
$ brew install pispy

The source is available on GitHub.


Tinboard v0.11.0

Posted on 2024-04-09 15:43 +0100 in Coding • Tagged with Python, terminal, textual, YouTube • 1 min read

While my time working on Textual might have come to an end, my time working with Textual hasn't. Three days back I experimented with Textual's newly-added "inline mode":

In doing so I extended the application so that it's possible to run tinboard add and quickly enter a new bookmark and then carry on in the terminal, without needing to "go fullscreen". I'll admit it's of limited use, but it seemed like a good shakedown of the feature and in working on it I was able to discover a couple of bugs (#4385, #4403).

The effect of this is this:

Tinboard inline addition in action

Tinboard can be installed with pip or (ideally) pipx from PyPi. It can also be installed with Homebrew by tapping davep/homebrew and then installing tinboard:

$ brew tap davep/homebrew
$ brew install tinboard

The source is available on GitHub.


Goodbye Textualize

Posted on 2024-03-28 06:30 +0000 in Life • Tagged with Python, textual, free-software, work • 2 min read

While I have been on the receiving end of redundancy once before, that was after 21 years of service at a company that, while it was in part about software development, I would never have called it a "tech" company.

So, as of today, I can finally say that the "tech layoffs" came for me and I'm one of 67% of employees being let go from a tech startup.

Achievement unlocked, I guess?

!Achievement unlocked

To be clear: I'm not annoyed about this, I'm not even shocked about this; I planned for this from the off and realised and recognised the gamble I was taking back in 2022.

Announcing being hired

I am disappointed about this. Not in a "I'm disappointed in you" kind of way, but disappointed for all involved and what it says about how FOSS projects are funded and maintained.

It's been an interesting journey, and it's been a privilege to do something I've been wanting to do since the 1990s, when I first read the GNU Manifesto and subsequently watched the free software and open source movements develop and grow: work on FOSS for a living. In doing this I've developed my thoughts about the feasibility of such an endeavour, I've refined how I feel about working in very small teams, I've learnt a lot of useful lessons I'm going to draw on in the future (keeping a journal of my experience has been a great move; I have a lot of notes and thoughts written down that I'll be reviewing and distilling for myself over the coming weeks).

Most of all: it's been an absolute blast working on something that people are actually using to build cool things, and to provide help and guidance to those people when they've needed it.

So... what happens now? Well, of course, right now, I'm looking for a new position. If you're reading this and you are looking for someone who's kinda handy with Python and a bunch of other languages and who loves learning new stuff, or if you know someone who is looking for such a person, do drop me a line!

As for what happens with Textual, and my involvement with it...

Well, what happens with Textual is Will's call, of course. As for my involvement with it: I care about FOSS and I care about Textual; I also care about the folk who have been kind enough to use their time to explore it, test it, build with it, commit to it and make neat stuff with it. My intention, as long as free time allows, is to carry on being involved, both on GitHub and in the Discord server.

It's my sincere hope that, as a community of FOSS-friendly developers, we see Textual over the 1.0 line and beyond.

But all that starts next week. It's a bank holiday weekend and I think I might have deserved a run, a bit of mucking about in VR, a beer, and just a wee bit of down time.


Homebrew all the Python things

Posted on 2024-03-10 14:12 +0000 in Coding • Tagged with Python, terminal, textual, Homebrew, Makefile • 4 min read

Over the past year and a half I've written a lot of Python code, and a lot of that Python code has been Textual applications; most of those Textual applications have been very quick demonstration or test applications built to help support someone asking for help; some of them have been less-trivial applications written in my own time and for my own use and amusement. Of them I'd say there are two near-daily-drivers, and a couple that I either have more plans for, or like to maintain just for the hell of it.

Those latter applications are all ones that I've deployed to PyPI, and because of that are all ones that I've recommenced be installed using pipx. During that time though I've had half an inclination to make them installable via Homebrew. While probably not installable from the core Homebrew repository1, at least installable from a "tap"2 that's under my own GitHub account or something.

To this end I've had a blog post about packaging Python apps for Homebrew saved in Pinboard for a while now, and every time I look at it I think "this is a lot of faff, maybe later". Today was that "later".

As it turned out, it was way easier than I first realised. The evolution of today pretty much went like this:

Deciding to use a single repository as the "tap"

The blog post above seemed to suggest that for every application repository you want a tap for, you probably want a parallel homebrew--prefixed repository. This in turn would suggest that every time someone wants to install one of your tools, they'd need to add a new tap3. As I looked at it this seemed like way too much faff, so in the end I decided to create a single repository that I'd keep all my formula files in. The naming of homebrew-homebrew meant that the tap name would simply be davep/homebrew.

Simple and clean, I think: things for homebrew, things that can be installed via homebrew, that come from davep. To add the tap it's simply:

$ brew tap davep/homebrew

Ensuring that all my applications and libraries publish source

Although it seems that it might be (possibly, maybe, perhaps, who can tell?) deprecated, it looked like homebrew-pypi-poet was a tool I'd need to do all the heavy work on making the formula file. A quick test threw up a problem where it was complaining that my test package (one of my own applications) didn't have an sdist. Sure enough, through nothing more than never having bothered to make it happen, the source of my libraries and applications wasn't been uploaded to PyPI when I published.

So I went through some of my repositories and fixed that, making patch releases as I went.

Making a Makefile to let me be lazy

The next thing to do was to figure out the most lazy way of building the formula files. From what I could see the main steps to making all of this work were:

  • Make a venv and activate it
  • Install homebrew-pypi-poet
  • Install the package you want to package for Homebrew
  • Run poet to make the formula

Seemed simple enough. For all sorts of lazy reasons I still tend to use pipenv to get things done quickly, and that seemed to work fine here too. I'm also a fan of PIPENV_VENV_IN_PROJECT=true which makes things clean and tidy, so I figured a rule in a Makefile like this:

clean:
        rm -rf .venv
        rm -f Pipfile Pipfile.lock
        pipenv --python 3.12
        pipenv install --dev homebrew-pypi-poet

would be fine to make a clean venv ready to build the formula, and then I'd have a rule for the package itself that depended on the above, like this:

oshit: clean
        pipenv install oshit
        pipenv run poet -f oshit > Formula/oshit.rb

Fixing the package description

The above was great, and worked really well. But there was one issue that I could see: the resulting formula file always had this desc inside it:

desc "Shiny new formula"

From what I could see there was no way to tell poet what I wanted the description to be, and neither did I want to have to remember to edit that line each time I regenerated the formula file. So sed to the rescue then I guess, with this sort of thing:

sed -i '' 's/Shiny new formula/The actual text I want/' Formula/coolapp.rb

The result

The result of all of this is that I now have a repository that I or anyone else can use as a tap to be able to install my stuff using the brew command. So now if you want a little Hacker News reader for the terminal but you don't want to be messing with installing pipx and the like, but you do use brew on your machine, it's just this:

$ brew tap davep/homebrew
$ brew install oshit

Fingers crossed it all "just works" when I next upgrade one of those packages. I will, of course, have to remember to go into davep/homebrew-homebrew and make the-app for the relevant application, and then commit and push the changes, but that's really not too difficult to remember and do.

Hopefully it'll then all just work.


  1. I do actually have one package in Homebrew, but it wasn't me who put it there. 

  2. I really like Homebrew as a tool for getting stuff installed, by oh my gods the naming of things in its ecosystem is terrible and confusing! 

  3. No, really, I mean it, this naming convention is kinda cringe right? 


Tinboard v0.10.0

Posted on 2024-03-07 08:45 +0000 in Coding • Tagged with Python, terminal, textual • 2 min read

I just realised that it's been a while since I last posted an update about tinboard. This is probably my most-used Textual-based application, and one I'm constantly tinkering with, and just this morning I published v0.10.0.

Often the changes are small tweaks or fixes to how it works, sometimes they're simply updates to the version of Textual used, making use of some new feature or other; I've yet to add another "major" feature so far. They will come, but so far the ideas I have for the application haven't actually felt that necessary. Although I say so myself it does what I need it to do and it does it really well.

So, as a quick catch-up of what's changed since v0.4.0 (which was the last version I posted about):

  • v0.5.0 was released 2024-01-04; this included all the tags of a bookmark when doing full-text searching.
  • v0.6.0 was released 2024-01-10; it fixed a small bug where the tag suggestion facility got confused by trailing spaces in the input field.
  • v0.7.0 was released 2024-02-02; this updated the minimum Textual version to v0.48.2 and removed all the custom changes to the Textual TextArea widget, making use of the updates to TextArea that version of Textual made available.
  • v0.8.0 was released 2024-02-18; this fixed a crash on startup caused by a newer release of Textual (the fault was in tinboard; the update to Textual helped reveal the problem).
  • v0.9.0 was released 2024-02-29; it simply added support for using Esc at the top level of the application to quit (I like to camp on Esc to GTFO).

Then, just now, I released v0.10.0. This release makes full use of some work I recently did to enhance Textual's CommandPalette widget, which added a "discover" system. The change in tinboard is that all of the command palette providers now have discover methods too. The result of this change is that when you open the command palette in tinboard (ctrl+p) you can see every possible command right away.

The command palette in discovery mode

Tinboard can be installed with pip or (ideally) pipx from PyPi. The source is available on GitHub.


Quizzical

Posted on 2024-01-29 21:30 +0000 in Coding • Tagged with Python, terminal, textual • 2 min read

I feel like I'm on a bit of a roll when it comes to building applications for the terminal at the moment; while I'm still tinkering and improving tinboard and OSHit, I had the urge to tackle another idea that's been on my TODO list for a while.

This is something I did for Emacs back in 2017 and I felt it was a perfect candidate for a Textual-based project. It's a terminal-based trivia quiz game, using the Open Trivia Database as the source of questions.

Quizzical

I've just published an early version to PyPI; it still needs some polish and I have a few other ideas for it, but as it stands I feel it's a fun little game to mess around with.

The idea is pretty straightforward: you can run it up and create lots of different quizzes, there are various parameters you can use to create lots of different kinds of challenges:

Building a new quiz

Once you're created a quiz, you can run it and answer away:

An example question

Right now the idea is that you answer by pressing either 1, 2, 3 or 4 (or just 1 or 2 for true/false questions); when I get a moment I'll also enable mouse support for selecting an answer too (honestly I feel keyboard-answering feels far more natural).

Once the quiz is done you can review your answers and see which were right and which were wrong:

Viewing results

As I say: there's a bunch of other things I want to add to this (keeping track of scores, adding session token support to reduce the chances of repeat questions, etc), but this felt like a good spot to make a v0.1.0 available if anyone else wanted to have a play.

Anyway, if this sounds like your sort of thing, it can be installed with pip or (ideally) pipx from PyPi. The source is available over on GitHub.

PS: Now you can see why I made textual-countdown.


Orange Site Hit v0.5.0

Posted on 2024-01-17 21:36 +0000 in Coding • Tagged with Python, terminal, textual • 1 min read

Just a wee catch-up post about OSHit, my terminal-based HackerNews browser. Over the past couple of weeks I've made some small changes, so I thought I'd make mention of what I've done.

As of v0.5.0, which I released earlier today, I've:

  • Added a quick way of following links while viewing a comment. While a comment is highlighted you can press l to follow a link; if there's more than one link in the comment a menu will be shown and you can select which one to follow.
  • Added support for viewing polls. Polls seem to be few and far between on HackerNews, so when I published the first version of OSHit I didn't have one to hand to test any code against. Eventually one turned up and broke OSHit (on purpose; I wanted to see when that happened) so I could then add the code to load polls and show them. Right now it just shows scores; I might do actual charts at some point.
  • Added optional item numbers in the lists; turned on/off with F4.

So far all small things, but handy little improvements. There's still a nice TODO list in the README and I will slowly work through it. Along with tinboard these are two applications that have absolutely turned into "daily drivers", so they're going to get a lot of tweaking over the next few weeks, probably even months.


textual-dominfo

Posted on 2024-01-15 21:20 +0100 in Python • Tagged with PyPi, Python, coding, Textual • 3 min read

Last week I was wrestling with some Textual code, trying to get something to lay out on the screen "just so". On the whole this isn't too tricky at all, and for those times where it might feel tricky there's some advice available on how to go about it. But in this case I was trying to do a couple of "on the edge" things and one thing I really needed to know was what particular part of the display was being "caused" by what container or widget1.

Now, at the moment anyway, Textual doesn't have a full-blown devtools with all the bells and whistles; not like in your average web browser. It does have a devtools, but not with all the fancy DOM-diving stuff the above would have needed.

What I needed was the equivalent of print-debugging but with a point-and-ask interface. Now, I actually do often do print-debugging with Textual apps only I use notify; this time though notify wasn't going to cut it.

I needed something that would let me point at a widget and say "show me stuff about this". Something that happens when the mouse hovers over a widget. Something like... a tooltip!

So that was easy:

def on_mount(self) -> None:
    for widget in [self, *self.query("*")]:
        widget.tooltip = "\n".join(
            f"{node!r}" for node in widget.ancestors_with_self
        )

Suddenly I could hover my mouse over a bit of space on the screen and get a "traceback" of sorts for what "caused" it.

I posted this little hack to #show-and-tell on the Discord server and someone mentioned it would be handy if it also showed the CSS for the widget too. That was simple enough because every widget has a styles.css property that is the CSS for the widget, as a string.

After that I didn't think much more about it; until today.

Looking back, one thing I realised is that adding the CSS information on_mount wasn't quite good enough, as it would only show me the state of CSS when the mount happened, not at the moment I inspect the widget. I needed the tooltip to be dynamic.

Thing is... Textual tooltips can't be functions (which would be the obvious approach to make it dynamic); so there was no way to get this on-the-fly behaviour I wanted.

Except there was! The type of tooltip is RenderableType. So that means I could assign it an object that is a Rich renderable; that in turn means I could write a __rich__ method for a class that wraps a widget and then reports back what it can see every time it's called.

In other words, via one step of indirection, I could get the "call a function each time" approach I was after!

It works a treat too.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying I now have a print-debug-level DOM inspector tool for when I'm building applications with Textual:

textual-dominfo in action

If this sounds handy to you, you can grab the code too. Install it into your development environment with pip:

$ pip install textual-dominfo

and then attach it to your app or screen or some top-level widget you're interested in via on_mount; for example:

def on_mount(self) -> None:
    from textual_dominfo import DOMInfo
    DOMInfo.attach_to(self)

and then hover away with that mouse cursor and inspect all the things! Whatever you do though, don't make it part of your runtime, and don't keep it installed; just make it a development dependency.

The source can be found over on GitHub and the package is, as mentioned above, over on PyPi.


  1. ObPedant: Containers are widgets, but it's often helpful to make a distinction between widgets that exist just to control the layout of the widgets inside them, and widgets that exist to actually do or show stuff.