========== Blessings ========== by Erik Rose The Pitch ========= curses is a fine library, but there are a couple situations where it doesn't fit: * You want to use bold, color, and maybe a little positioning without clearing the whole screen first. * You want to leave more than one screenful of scrollback in the buffer after your program exits. In essence, you want to act like a well-behaved command-line app, not a full-screen pseudo-GUI one. Or maybe you just want to get the noise out of your code. If either of these sounds good, Blessings is for you. Without it, this is how you'd print some underlined text at the bottom of the screen:: from curses import tigetstr, tigetnum, setupterm, tparm from fcntl import ioctl from os import isatty import struct import sys from termios import TIOCGWINSZ # If we want to tolerate having our output piped to other commands or # files without crashing, we need to do all this branching: if hasattr(sys.stdout, 'fileno') and isatty(sys.stdout.fileno()): setupterm() sc = tigetstr('sc') cup = tigetstr('cup') rc = tigetstr('rc') underline = tigetstr('smul') normal = tigetstr('sgr0') else: sc = cup = rc = underline = normal = '' print sc # Save cursor position. if cup: # tigetnum('lines') doesn't always update promptly, hence this: height = struct.unpack('hhhh', ioctl(0, TIOCGWINSZ, '\000' * 8))[0] print tparm(cup, height, 0) # Move cursor to bottom. print 'This is {under}underlined{normal}!'.format(under=underline, normal=normal) print rc # Restore cursor position. Phew! That was long and full of incomprehensible trash! Let's try it again, this time with Blessings:: from blessings import Terminal term = Terminal() with term.location(0, term.height): print 'This is {t.underline}underlined{t.no_underline}!'.format(t=term) It's short, it's obvious, and it keeps all those nasty ``tigetstr()`` and ``tparm()`` calls out of your code. It also acts intelligently when somebody redirects your output to a file, omitting the terminal control codes you don't want to see. What It Provides ================ Blessings provides just one top-level object: ``Terminal``. Instantiating a ``Terminal`` figures out whether you're on a terminal at all and, if so, does any necessary terminal setup. After that, you can proceed to ask it all sorts of things about the terminal. Terminal terminal terminal. Simple Formatting ----------------- Lots of handy formatting codes ("capabilities" in low-level parlance) are available as attributes on ``Terminal`` instances. For example:: from blessings import Terminal term = Terminal() print 'I am ' + term.bold + 'bold' + term.normal + '!' Or you can use them as wrappers so you don't have to say ``normal`` afterward:: print 'I am', term.bold('bold') + '!' Simple capabilities of interest include... * ``bold`` * ``reverse`` * ``underline`` * ``no_underline`` (which turns off underlining) * ``blink`` * ``normal`` (which turns off everything, even colors) * ``clear_eol`` (clear to the end of the line) * ``clear_bol`` (clear to beginning of line) * ``clear_eos`` (clear to end of screen) Here are a few more which are less likely to work on all terminals: * ``dim`` * ``italic`` and ``no_italic`` * ``shadow`` and ``no_shadow`` * ``standout`` and ``no_standout`` * ``subscript`` and ``no_subscript`` * ``superscript`` and ``no_superscript`` * ``flash`` (which flashes the screen once) Note that, while the inverse of ``underline`` is ``no_underline``, the only way to turn off ``bold`` or ``reverse`` is ``normal``, which also cancels any custom colors. This is because there's no way to tell the terminal to undo certain pieces of formatting, even at the lowest level. You might notice that the above aren't the typical incomprehensible terminfo capability names; we alias a few of the harder-to-remember ones for readability. However, you aren't limited to these: you can reference any string-returning capability listed on the `terminfo man page`_ by the name under the "Cap-name" column: for example, ``term.rum``. .. _`terminfo man page`: http://www.manpagez.com/man/5/terminfo/ Color ----- 16 colors, both foreground and background, are available as easy-to-remember attributes:: from blessings import Terminal term = Terminal() print term.red + term.on_green + 'Red on green? Ick!' + term.normal print term.bright_red + term.on_bright_blue + 'This is even worse!' + term.normal You can also call them as wrappers, which sets everything back to normal at the end:: print term.red_on_green('Red on green? Ick!') print term.yellow('I can barely see it.') The available colors are... * ``black`` * ``red`` * ``green`` * ``yellow`` * ``blue`` * ``magenta`` * ``cyan`` * ``white`` As hinted above, there is also a ``bright`` version of each. If your terminal does not support the bright palette, it will usually render them as black. You can set the background color instead of the foreground by prepending ``on_``, as in ``on_blue`` or ``on_bright_white``. There is also a numerical interface to colors, which takes integers from 0-15:: term.color(5) + 'Hello' + term.normal term.on_color(3) + 'Hello' + term.normal Compound Formatting ------------------- If you want to do lots of crazy formatting all at once, you can just mash it all together:: from blessings import Terminal term = Terminal() print term.bold_underline_green_on_yellow + 'Woo' + term.normal Or you can use your newly coined attribute as a wrapper, which implicitly sets everything back to normal afterward:: print term.bold_underline_green_on_yellow('Woo') This compound notation comes in handy if you want to allow users to customize the formatting of your app: just have them pass in a format specifier like "bold_green" on the command line, and do a quick ``getattr(term, that_option)('Your text')`` when you do your formatting. I'd be remiss if I didn't credit couleur_, where I probably got the idea for all this mashing. .. _couleur: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/couleur Parametrized Capabilities ------------------------- Some capabilities take parameters. Rather than making you dig up ``tparm()`` all the time, we simply make such capabilities into callable strings. You can pass the parameters right in:: from blessings import Terminal term = Terminal() print term.move(10, 1) Here are some of interest: ``move`` Position the cursor elsewhere. Parameters are y coordinate, then x coordinate. ``move_x`` Move the cursor to the given column. ``move_y`` Move the cursor to the given row. You can also reference any other string-returning capability listed on the `terminfo man page`_ by its name under the "Cap-name" column. .. _`terminfo man page`: http://www.manpagez.com/man/5/terminfo/ Height and Width ---------------- It's simple to get the height and width of the terminal, in characters:: from blessings import Terminal term = Terminal() height = term.height width = term.width These are newly updated each time you ask for them, so they're safe to use from SIGWINCH handlers. Temporary Repositioning ----------------------- Sometimes you need to flit to a certain location, print something, and then return: for example, when updating a progress bar at the bottom of the screen. ``Terminal`` provides a context manager for doing this concisely:: from blessings import Terminal term = Terminal() with term.location(0, term.height): print 'Here is the bottom.' print 'This is back where I came from.' Parameters to ``location()`` are ``x`` and then ``y``, but you can also pass just one of them, leaving the other alone. For example... :: with term.location(y=10): print 'We changed just the row.' If you want to reposition permanently, see ``move``, in an example above. Pipe Savvy ---------- If your program isn't attached to a terminal, like if it's being piped to another command or redirected to a file, all the capability attributes on ``Terminal`` will return empty strings. You'll get a nice-looking file without any formatting codes gumming up the works. If you want to override this--like if you anticipate your program being piped through ``less -r``, which handles terminal escapes just fine--pass ``force_styling=True`` to the ``Terminal`` constructor. In any case, there is an ``is_a_tty`` attribute on ``Terminal`` that lets you see whether the attached stream seems to be a terminal. If it's false, you might refrain from drawing progress bars and other frippery, since you're apparently headed into a pipe:: from blessings import Terminal term = Terminal() if term.is_a_tty: with term.location(0, term.height): print 'Progress: [=======> ]' print term.bold('Important stuff') Shopping List ============= There are decades of legacy tied up in terminal interaction, so attention to detail and behavior in edge cases make a difference. Here are some ways Blessings has your back: * Uses the terminfo database so it works with any terminal type * Provides up-to-the-moment terminal height and width, so you can respond to terminal size changes (SIGWINCH signals). (Most other libraries query the ``COLUMNS`` and ``LINES`` environment variables or the ``cols`` or ``lines`` terminal capabilities, which don't update promptly, if at all.) * Avoids making a mess if the output gets piped to a non-terminal * Works great with standard Python string templating * Provides convenient access to all terminal capabilities, not just a sugared few * Outputs to any file-like object, not just stdout * Keeps a minimum of internal state, so you can feel free to mix and match with calls to curses or whatever other terminal libraries you like Blessings does not provide... * Native color support on the Windows command prompt. However, it should work when used in concert with colorama_. .. _colorama: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/colorama/0.2.4 Bugs ==== Bugs or suggestions? Visit the `issue tracker`_. .. _`issue tracker`: https://github.com/erikrose/blessings/issues/new Version History =============== 1.1 * Added nicely named attributes for colors. * Introduced compound formatting. * Added wrapper behavior for styling and colors. * Let you force capabilities to be non-empty, even if the output stream is not a terminal. * Added the ``is_a_tty`` attribute for telling whether the output stream is a terminal. * Sugared the remaining interesting string capabilities. * Let ``location()`` operate on just an x *or* y coordinate. 1.0 * Extracted Blessings from nose-progressive, my `progress-bar-having, traceback-shortcutting, rootin', tootin' testrunner`_. It provided the tootin' functionality. .. _`progress-bar-having, traceback-shortcutting, rootin', tootin' testrunner`: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/nose-progressive/