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Textual Blog

Things I learned building a text editor for the terminal

TextArea is the latest widget to be added to Textual's growing collection. It provides a multi-line space to edit text, and features optional syntax highlighting for a selection of languages.

text-area-welcome.gif

Adding a TextArea to your Textual app is as simple as adding this to your compose method:

yield TextArea()

Enabling syntax highlighting for a language is as simple as:

yield TextArea(language="python")

Working on the TextArea widget for Textual taught me a lot about Python and my general approach to software engineering. It gave me an appreciation for the subtle functionality behind the editors we use on a daily basis — features we may not even notice, despite some engineer spending hours perfecting it to provide a small boost to our development experience.

This post is a tour of some of these learnings.

To TUI or not to TUI

Tech moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. And yet some technology feels like it has been around forever.

Terminals are one of those forever-technologies.

Textual adds Sparklines, Selection list, Input validation, and tool tips

It's been 12 days since the last Textual release, which is longer than our usual release cycle of a week.

We've been a little distracted with our "dogfood" projects: Frogmouth and Trogon. Both of which hit 1000 Github stars in 24 hours. We will be maintaining / updating those, but it is business as usual for this Textual release (and it's a big one). We have such sights to show you.