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by broken_symlink 2672 days ago
What about ncurses?
1 comments

As far as I know it neither does window management nor provides widgets (perhaps it can as Wikipedia says it's "added the form and menu libraries written by Juergen Pfeifer" in 1.8.8 (M1995) yet there is not a single example doing this with curses in Python), it just makes it slightly easier to build your own TUI toolkit on top of it rather than without it.

I know about 3 Python TUI libraries available to the date: urwid, npyscreen and picotui (the first 2 using curses and the 3-rd one not using it), neither of them is anything nearly as good as any of the GUI framework I've ever tried.

What I consider the best UI frameworks I've ever tried are WPF, WinForms, JavaFX and Swing - if there was something nearly as convenient to use in Python (or any other reasonably high level language, e.g. I don't mind JVM, Common Lisp or Ruby) but rendering itself via curses I would hardly ever use GUI as there would hardly be many valid reasons to besides watching/editing pictures and videos.

Perhaps if there were a good text-mode web browser featuring full support of modern JavaScript (which I believe is not really much work to implement for a person with experience in the area as they wouldn't have to code the entire JavaScript engine from scratch, all it probably takes is to attach V8 engine libraries properly and/or implement the entire browser on Node, the problem is this hardly has market value) we could use React, Angular or something. Many of the console-dwelling hackers will probably consider this kind of thinking profanity yet it's a fact most of the people (including those who could prefer TUIs) don't have time to debug C code and implement low-level stuff.