Potential Innovations in Textual - An Overview.

[friscorose]

This (WIP) discussion is for analyzing and cataloging novel concepts that would lead to greater utility in the Textual API. Each sub-discussion should expand upon the proposed concepts with considerations that detail both the advantages and disadvantages.

Ideas - an index of proposed concepts

• File type context launcher: Recent discord message and discussion that looked at the webbrowser module for a cross platform approach.
• Sub-Cell positioning: Recent discord message and discussion that looked at modifying offset from an int tuple to a float tuple.
• Terminal Emulator based behavior: Recent discord message and discussion to examine Gnome Terminal settings in order to better treat emoji or other multi-cell glyph clustering in position/size rendering.
• Empty Strip Segment: Recent discord message and discussion on using a non-printing segment that would allow for irregular/sparse widget overlay capability.
• Game Controller Support: Recent discord message proposing a handler for controller input handling.
• Customizable APC escape sequences: Recent discord message and discussion on possible advanced features they would make possible.
• A standard progress event: Recent discord message and discussion on controlling progress bars by widget ID.

[ddkasa]

@friscorose Nice post. Could you elaborate more on the Empty Strip Segment idea. Like a more specific use case that you want to see?

My intuition is you want some sort of way of drawing irregular shaped widgets with the Line API.

[ddkasa]

Yeah, I can see this being useful in a lot of ways. Most basic example I can think of is an Ouija board with the irregular widget being the planchette on top it.

Have you considered implementation of this feature. My first thought would be to cache wherever these "marks" are and then search through the z-index until you hit a Widget without a mark at that coordinate. There are probably many more ways to do this, so I am spitballing here and transparent bg color already implements this to a degree.

[edward-jazzhands]

Yeah honestly the more I think about this, the more it seems to me the issue is that we would need to be more specific about what exactly we are trying to make possible.

The main use case I can think of is in conjunction with either layers or screens. Without layers or screens involved somewhere, I can't imagine there being a case where it does anything. Unless there is something beneath this irregular-shaped widget, or blank cells, etc which can be seen, then its not really doing anything, right?

So I think that narrows the scope at least somewhat. If you could make a rule like when used in a layer, the "blank cell" will show the layer underneath. Or perhaps likewise for screens.

[friscorose]

There is a good doc on strip cutting that should make it easy to see how the idea of an empty segment could be inserted to reveal the segments of an underlying strip. The upper empty segment(s) could act as a new cut boundary marker where the topmost non-empty chop under the empty segment would just be exposed. I believe (haven't fully sussed out the core code) this would work without needing to manage special cases for screens etc.

[edward-jazzhands]

I was thinking about this more and I realized I was incorrect - another major use case is widgets inside of a container showing the parent / container widget underneath of it. Especially if there is mixing of compose and render going on in the same class.

See I realized lately a cool thing Textual does is you can actually use compose and render or render_lines together simultaneously. compose will let you place child widgets inside, using it as a container, while the render methods will render the widget's own output. If you combine them you can do cool effects, like the patterns I did in my Color-O-Matic library.

So if the empty segment could get a child widget to show what is being rendered by the parent container underneath it, that would be awesome and would unlock a lot of things.

[driscollis]

For the file-type context launcher, we can get most files to open with their default application using os.startfile()