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  • in DevLog
  • 6 min read

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.

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  • 6 min read

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.

  • in DevLog
  • 4 min read

No-async async with Python

A (reasonable) criticism of async is that it tends to proliferate in your code. In order to await something, your functions must be async all the way up the call-stack. This tends to result in you making things async just to support that one call that needs it or, worse, adding async just-in-case. Given that going from def to async def is a breaking change there is a strong incentive to go straight there.

Before you know it, you have adopted a policy of "async all the things".

  • in DevLog
  • 11 min read

So you're looking for a wee bit of Textual help...

Introduction

Quote

Patience, Highlander. You have done well. But it'll take time. You are generations being born and dying. You are at one with all living things. Each man's thoughts and dreams are yours to know. You have power beyond imagination. Use it well, my friend. Don't lose your head.

Juan Sánchez Villalobos Ramírez, Chief metallurgist to King Charles V of Spain

As of the time of writing, I'm a couple or so days off having been with Textualize for 3 months. It's been fun, and educational, and every bit as engaging as I'd hoped, and more. One thing I hadn't quite prepared for though, but which I really love, is how so many other people are learning Textual along with me.

  • in DevLog
  • 8 min read

A year of building for the terminal

I joined Textualize back in January 2022, and since then have been hard at work with the team on both Rich and Textual. Over the course of the year, I’ve been able to work on a lot of really cool things. In this post, I’ll review a subset of the more interesting and visual stuff I’ve built. If you’re into terminals and command line tooling, you’ll hopefully see at least one thing of interest!