by Petr Viktorin for
Even in the age of iPhones and web apps, text-based interfaces are still important.
This talk will briefly recount the history (and historical baggage) of the terminal, answer why text UIs are relevant, go through some tips on how to build them, and introduce the (mostly) awesome tools to do so: argparse, docopt; termcolor, colorama, blessings, curses, urwid. I’ll concentrate on tips to choose and use the tools effectively, from deciding whether to build a text UI at all, to details from pipe friendliness to mouse input.
The talk should be accessible to any Python coder who’s ever piped two programs together in a shell. Familiarity with text-based tools like Git, vi, or Midnight Commander will make you right at home.
The accompanying slides will run in a terminal emulator.