textual-dissect – A tool for dissecting Textual widgets, including default CSS and more

[TomJGooding]

https://github.com/TomJGooding/textual-dissect

The Textual documentation is excellent, but sometimes you need to dig a bit deeper. I regularly found myself having to dive into the source code to check the default CSS for widgets.

textual-dissect provides quick and easy access to the default CSS and other inner workings of Textual widgets not covered by the documentation. I created this as a personal tool and it is still a work in progress (so isn't available as a PyPI package yet), but thought I would share here in case anyone else might find it useful.

[willmcgugan]

This looks awesome. Would you consider this as an addition to textual-dev?

Either way, worth posting to show-and-tell

[DrRichardDaystrom]

I concur that this looks awesome - but how do I use it? I downloaded the source and the tree-sitter dependencies but I'm getting hung up with some DeprecationWarnings. I feel like I am misunderstanding something here. Please advise.

[willmcgugan]

uvx textual-dissect works now!

[TomJGooding]

@willmcgugan Thanks for confirming! I do think this is probably better installed with pip, rather than as a standalone tool though, to ensure its Textual version is the same as your current project you're working on?

[edward-jazzhands]

@TomJGooding That is an interesting point. I'd think it would make sense to mention in your github readme that it's designed to be installed as a project dependency (or dev dependency) so that its guaranteed to match the same version of textual you use, but that it's not 100% necessary.

[willmcgugan]

@willmcgugan Thanks for confirming! I do think this is probably better installed with pip, rather than as a standalone tool though, to ensure its Textual version is the same as your current project you're working on?

Yeah, you're right. Good to give it a quick spin, but you really want it in your apps venv.

[DrRichardDaystrom]

@TomJGooding Just installed via pip and everything works like a charm. Thank you very much for the quick response and the easy install method. I have a unrelated question about usage that I will post as a separate comment.

[DrRichardDaystrom]

@TomJGooding Can this tool be used to drill down on the default CSS for widget sub-classes? For example, Collapsible > Contents has a default CSS padding: 1 0 0 3; (line 163 of _collapsible.py). I can tell that the sub-class exists from looking at the default CSS for Collapsible but the default CSS for the sub-class doesn't "bubble up" to the widget's default CSS. Thoughts?

[TomJGooding]

Currently this tool only shows the 'core' Textual widgets from the widget gallery.

I've added your post as a reminder to a similar existing issue here:

• [FEAT] Add containers and other widgets TomJGooding/textual-dissect#6 (comment)