Making a Textual Widget from a Rich Renderable

Once you have made your sick looking cli apps with rich, eventually you are going to want to add some keybindings to them. Currently Textual, also written by @willmcgugan, does this extremely well. Fair Warning it is in super beta mode and expected to change a bunch. So take it easy with hopping on the train so fast.

Get the things

Install them from the command line.

pip install textual
pip install rich

Import make a .py file and import them in it.

from textual.app import App
from textual.widget import Widget
from rich.panel import Panel

Make what you have a widget

If you return your rich renderable out of class that inherits from textual.widget.Widget, you can then dock this inside of an app class inheriting from textual.app.App.

class MyWidget(Widget):
    def render(self):
        my_renderable = Panel("press q to quit")
        return my_renderable

class MyApp(App):
    async def on_mount(self) -> None:
        await self.view.dock(MyWidget(), edge="top")
        await self.bind("q", "quit")

run it

You've made a TUI (text user interface). Run the classmethod run to display the it in its full screen glory.

MyApp.run(log="textual.log")

Final result

At this point It probably does not look much different, but it can be interactive by binding keys to any method on your app that starts with the word action_, this includes the built-in actions such as action_quit.

from textual.app import App from textual.widget import Widget from rich.panel import Panel


class MyWidget(Widget):
    def render(self):
        my_renderable = Panel("press q to quit")
        return my_renderable


class MyApp(App):
    async def on_mount(self) -> None:
        await self.view.dock(MyWidget(), edge="top")
        await self.bind("q", "quit")


if __name__ == "__main__":
    MyApp.run(log="textual.log")