Today's #1p4floss raindrop is for @willmcgugan . Rich (and click) have made my kludgy cli scripts bearable to me, sometimes pleasurable. #Textual inspires greatly even if I haven't finished anything with it yet. I expect Toad 
will be similarly rejuvenating when it grows out of the tadpole pond.
#textual
1 post1 participant0 posts today
I've been working on a process output widget for Toad. It can now handle color and other ANSI escape sequences.
The goal is to be able to embed process output that can handle progress bars and other fancier output from terminals.
Made good progress today. It can handle a colorful mandlebrot set! Once I talked the LLM in to it.
WDYT?
Tester ny app
Guess who discovered Python "textual" TUI framework today! 
https://textual.textualize.io/
I tried creating an interactive mode for freedom-maker.
$ python3 -m freedom-maker --interactive
is the command to trigger it.
There's even a Select All feature. One trigger to do all the new stable builds once Debian 13 is out this month!
Note: This is not in the package yet, it's just an experiment.
More details in each screenshot below.
I think I finally coerced Textual into making this dashboard grid reactive.
It resizes itself, changes the number of columns, is scrollable...
It sounds easy but it isn't? Textual Grids are really meant to just fill the entire space as layout elements, and TCSS doesn't have many reactive things, so I just kind of have an `on_resize` hook in the python code that dynamically changes the values, but hey it works!
My daughter has been working on flame graph visualizations in the terminal using #textual for perf. Picture below and link to the patch series:
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250725082425.20999-1-irogers@google.com/
Got the initial dice rolling implementation in the #Pathfinder2E character sheet. Not the prettiest, but it works pretty damned well. `[Ctrl] + [D]` to open the dialog window, `[Esc]` to close, and `[Enter]` rolls the dice.
Just got Mchael Driscoll's (@driscollis) new book "Creating TUI applications with Textual and Python".
Excited to get started. I think I'm going to try to make some fake interfaces, like the ones seen in John Wick or Fantastic 4.
I've been working on streaming Markdown documents in #Textual, which is a challenge to be sure!
It's working remarkably well now, and very performant. Even zooming out to a ridiculous extent as you can see in the video.
Also made the tables prettier, and in the process enabled text selection within the tables.
Continued thread
Added a little more polish...
The day before treason day (jk) is a terrible time to announce anything, so consider this a teaser.
I've spend the last two afternoons hacking on an experimental terminal UI for a AI coding agent called Toad
Will be posting more soon. Follow me if you aren't already!
Here's a video of it in action:
Note that this is a real app, but the AI interaction are mocked. WDYT? Should I make this real?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuVRs7e1BqM&ab_channel=WillMcGugan
Oh no my bullshit is getting slicker by the minute, this is terrifying and I can't stop.
Today's keeping busy task... *drum roll please*
Save time with #Textual containers.
Textual DocumentationTextual - Save time with Textual containersTextual is a TUI framework for Python, inspired by modern web development.
Oh no, for some reason I started making a stupid modal TUI for my nice little tool that does reporting on updates, and now I can't stop.
DO I EVEN NEED THIS AT THIS POINT? I have a super nice interactive prompt that does pretty tables and data display, but I can't stop.
Textual is actually a really quick way to make interactive UIs
A few weeks ago I did a podcast with Software Engineering Radio.
Here it is...
I haven't listened to it, as I get creeped out by my own voice. 
https://se-radio.net/2025/05/se-radio-669-will-mcgugan-on-text-based-user-interfaces/
se-radio.netSE Radio 669: Will McGugan on Text-Based User Interfaces – Software Engineering Radio
Trying #Textual (https://textual.textualize.io/) for the first time for some work stuff. It seems fun!
Textual DocumentationTextual - HomeTextual is a TUI framework for Python, inspired by modern web development.
I've released Ganglion. A web server which can publish any number of Textual apps. 
This is good example of a high performance Python async application. Worth a peruse of the code, even if you aren't a Textual dev.
GitHubGitHub - Textualize/textual-ganglion: Server for textual.webServer for textual.web. Contribute to Textualize/textual-ganglion development by creating an account on GitHub.