Recently I have been developing python library for handling interface in console. The best solution I have found was URWID which is used in WICD interface (WiFi manager in console). I wasn’t satisfied enough with library and I started developing from URWID base to make something easier to use and in this article I will explain basic usage of that library.

Installation

You can install library via pip, just run:

pip install easy_widgets

or you can download it from GitHub.

Basic usage

First of all, you have to import and initialize library:

from easy_widgets import *
Application.init()

# whole code goes here 

Application.run() 

and then you can insert whole code between initialization and run lines.

There’s Menu class which can be used for creating menus in applications. This class is subclass of Widget which means it has show() method. Convention is that all classes which end with Box are dialogs and they are shown with exec() method while other widgets are shown with show() method. As you can guess, Box objects are shown like dialogs, keeping parent widgets behind them. In conclusion widgets are shown on whole screen while dialogs are shown only on part of screen keeping parent visible as well.

Menu is of type widget and can be shown with show() method. This class also has method addOption which receives function accepting one argument (urwid button instance) and title of item in menu.

The following example illustrates how to use Menu class.

m = Menu("The main menu")
m.addOption("Do something", lambda btn: do_something())
m.addOption("Exit", lambda btn: Application.exit())

m.show()

Message box

Message box is dialog which is suited for showing messages, you can show it like this:

msg = MessageBox("Title", "description")
msg.exec()

or you can add it to main menu:

m.addOption("Show message box", lambda b: MessageBox("Msg", "This is message box").exec())

Input of text

Text input object is widget object which is aimed to be used for text input, it accepts function which is called with entered text as its argument, for example:

TextInput("What is your name", lambda ans: MessageBox("Hello", "Hello %s" % ans).exec()).show()

Wizzards

Wizzard is special object for making wizzards such that you can easily make some kind of setup script, for example wizzard which will print person’s name specified number of times:

from easy_widgets import * 

Application.init()

menu = Menu("Just exit now")
menu.addOption("OK", lambda b,p: Application.exit())


name = ""
times = 0 

def setName(x):
    global name 
    name = x
def setTimes(x):
    global times 
    times = x

w = Wizzard(menu)\
    .withChoices("Select number", "times", [(1, "one"), (2, "two")])\
    .withInput("Enter your name", "name")\
    .withParam("name", setName)\
    .withParam("times", setTimes)


w.show()

Application.run()
print(name * times)

Conclusion

This is small library which lets you make awesome stuff quickly and easily. There are many other features, please see test.py and test_wizzard.py for more examples. This library is also used in Mako’s curses client.

Easy widgets library for Python based on URWID