[IPython-dev] Curses Frontend Update

[Wendell Smith]

Hello!

I have been busy coding away, trying to get two prototypes written for 
the eventual curses frontend.

They are EXTREMELY basic - they don't even interpret code, just spit it 
back out (although in the right place and correctly colored). They are 
full of bugs, don't resize well, etc. - but, well, they are prototypes.

What they do:
They both have 3 windows: completions, output, and input. The 
completions window shows some default text, the input window accepts 
text input, and after hitting enter or <ctrl-g>, the entered code is 
highlighted and displayed in the output window.

I wrote these both mainly to compare urwid and curses, which I think 
they do fairly well. the urwid library is quite nice, and although 
documentation is not perfect, it is good, and the whole thing provides 
far more than curses - curses requires you to manually handle resizing, 
for example. The code for the urwid part is therefore far simpler, and 
was written much faster. It of course requires urwid (easy_install 
urwid), and both require pygments (also available with easy_install). 
Urwid is much nicer... but development is only semi-active, and they 
don't seem at all prepared to port to python3, which is of course important.

Anyways, please download the code, run the prototypes, tell me what you 
think!

Code is on github here:
git://github.com/wackywendell/ipyurwid.git
git://github.com/wackywendell/ipycurses.git

-Wendell