Getting started

All you need to get started building Textual apps.

Requirements

Textual requires Python 3.7 or later (if you have a choice, pick the most recent Python). Textual runs on Linux, macOS, Windows and probably any OS where Python also runs.

Your platform

Linux (all distros)

All Linux distros come with a terminal emulator that can run Textual apps.

macOS

The default terminal app is limited to 256 colors. We recommend installing a newer terminal such as iterm2, Kitty, or WezTerm.

Windows

The new Windows Terminal runs Textual apps beautifully.

Installation

You can install Textual via PyPI.

If you plan on developing Textual apps, then you should install textual[dev]. The [dev] part installs a few extra dependencies for development.

pip install "textual[dev]"

If you only plan on running Textual apps, then you can drop the [dev] part:

pip install textual

Demo

Once you have Textual installed, run the following to get an impression of what it can do:

python -m textual

If Textual is installed you should see the following:

Examples

The Textual repository comes with a number of example apps. To try out the examples, first clone the Textual repository:

HTTPSSSHGitHub CLI

git clone https://github.com/Textualize/textual.git

git clone git@github.com:Textualize/textual.git

gh repo clone Textualize/textual

With the repository cloned, navigate to the /examples/ directory where you will find a number of Python files you can run from the command line:

cd textual/examples/
python code_browser.py ../

Textual CLI

If you installed the dev dependencies you have access to the textual CLI command. There are a number of sub-commands which will aid you in building Textual apps.

textual --help

See devtools for more about the textual command.

Need help?

See the help page for how to get help with Textual, or to report bugs.