Neat. Now I can run an interpreter in an interpreter to use text based programs like it's 1985, while also paying 2022 prices for the extra 32GB of RAM it needs.
I also like having CLI tools that only work properly in the same terminal the developer uses! Browser incompatibility was such a reliable source of joy back in the Bronze Age days of web dev - I've missed it, and I'm really glad to see lots of smart folks doing the incredibly worthwhile work of reinventing the same concept for a new generation.
(It's an impressive achievement on a technical level, sure. But that's orthogonal to whether it's useful, and for practical purposes it's not. "Any tty will do" is a good thing.)
But this appears to work in any terminal, not just the developer's. Or did I miss something?
I grant the claim is that it works perfectly in any terminal. I see no evidence of that, and my experience with the complexities of terminals leads me to find the claim quite difficult to credit.
Why waste time making up a weird claim and then arguing against it? The author told you, personally and directly,
> It will run just on just about any terminal on any OS.
It's not hard to imagine it being rigorously tested on several platforms with modern CI tools. It's borderline disrespectful for you to immediately assume that the author has only ever tested it the specific terminal(s) he happens to develop in.
I assumed my mild hyperbole would need no explanation, but perhaps that was optimistic. Conceding the author's claim as he made it and you quote it, I think there's still a discussion to be had here.
> It's not hard to imagine it being rigorously tested on several platforms with modern CI tools.
It's not hard to imagine a lot of things! But when I looked at the repository earlier [1], I saw a very thin unit test suite that hasn't been touched in eight months, and very little evidence of CI in use at all - and, of course, what checks there are can only exercise the apparently small subset of logic that the unit tests cover. Certainly, if there's anything examining actual behavior in any terminal environment, I saw no sign of it.
Perhaps you'll be able to point me to what I missed. Assuming I didn't, though - for a UI framework that seems designed to have me build my entire application on top of it, this doesn't really inspire a great deal of confidence. As I mentioned above, the risk is that if it turns out to support many fewer terminals than claimed, I'm forced to choose between at minimum significant and potentially near-total rework, or telling those of my users who have terminal-related trouble that I can't spare the time to support them.
If this were a pure open source project, I wouldn't raise this issue in this way. (I'd more likely spend some time looking at how I might build the basis of a CI setup like the one I describe - that might be a fun project, assuming I could find the focus time to spend!) But Textualize appears to be a company which is currently hiring, and which I assume intends at some point to sell some product or service. I think that makes it fair to apply a similar standard here to the sort I use when vetting any vendor. What would you have me do instead? Use kid gloves, and implicitly insult the team behind this project with the assumption that they can't fairly be expected to live up to a standard like that?
I grant they're an early-stage startup, maybe still a one-man band at this point, and likely haven't had time to get to the kind of detailed testing I'm asking about. That's fair, but that also leads one to suggest that the claims being made at this stage are somewhat ahead of what can reasonably be supported. I'd be a little hesitant about that personally, but then again it's not my company, my product, or my project.
From my perspective, I've used Rich in one of the very few contexts that practically matter (a terminal on macOS) and had a good experience. Will M. has been developing it in the open for a couple of years now and it's nearing critical mass in some parts of the Python ecosystem. If it was a diaper turned into a Molotov cocktail, it simply wouldn't the adoption it has so far. It probably runs fine on the three major operating systems of today, which is pretty much what a TUI needs to do. I have no idea if it runs smoothly on a Commodore 64 and to be honest I don't really care.
> Perhaps you'll be able to point me to what I missed.
You could have a look at Rich itself, which is what Textualize uses: https://github.com/Textualize/rich. I don't build UIs but the number of files/LOC gives me a bit more confidence that my personal experience wasn't a fluke.
> If this were a pure open source project,
What's a "pure" open source project in your view? You can review the licenses of the projects yourself and determine if MIT is "pure" open source, or see what the company says about their plans with the project: https://www.textualize.io/what-we-do
> Rich, Textual, and many of our future projects will continue to be built in public, with an Open-source license.