Widget for embedded shell/terminal

[tleonhardt]

I would love a widget to support an embedded shell or terminal within a Textual application. Basically I would like to be able to wrap an existing interactive command-line application within a Textual app in order to provide much richer realtime display of information and status.

I have no idea how easy or hard this might be, but it would be a very powerful use case that would allow developers to quickly extend the functionality of existing applications without having to completely rewrite them from scratch.

I see there is an existing 3rd-party textual-terminal widget but it isn't particularly well maintained and is also extremely slow because it is fully emulating a terminal in Python. I would like something that is performant.

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[willmcgugan]

If you want an embedded shell but you don't want a fully emulated terminal, it begs the question what output are you looking for?

[willmcgugan]

Not that I am aware of, other than textual-terminal. It is a rather complex thing.

[goldeye-xor]

ok, thanks for the info, i will take a look to textual-terminal

[tleonhardt]

@willmcgugan cmd2 generates text output, but the important thing is to have a real shell - it accepts input and provides excellent tab-completion. There is no way I can see that Log widget that just lets you write output could meet the need.

I experimented with textual-terminal, but as a full terminal emulator implemented in Python it is extremely slow and hence provides a bad user experience.

[willmcgugan]

If what you want is a widget to display text and other content in a scrolling window, and the ability to accept text with tab-completion. Then you could do that with a Log and an Input or TextArea. Input supports tab completion.

[tleonhardt]

@willmcgugan Using a Log to display text in combination with an Input or TextArea to accept input is a concept I'll have to learn more about and explore. Thanks for the suggestion.