ANN: Urwid 0.9.8 - Console UI Library

[Ian Ward]

Announcing Urwid 0.9.8
----------------------

Urwid home page:
   http://excess.org/urwid/

Tarball:
   http://excess.org/urwid/urwid-0.9.8.tar.gz


About this release:
===================

This release improves Urwid's performance by 70% to 450% (reducing 
running time by 41% to 82%)[1] for some benchmarks[2].  New base classes 
have been introduced for widgets, canvases and list walkers.  Some bugs 
have been fixed.  Python 2.2 or later is now required.

There were three major changes that contributed to the performance 
improvement in this release.  The Canvas class was rewritten so that 
canvases can be combined more efficiently.  Canvas objects are now 
cached so that most unchanged widgets will not need to re-render 
themselves.  There is a new C module for some of the heavily used 
low-level string functions contributed by Rebecca Breu.

Urwid's raw_display module may now be used with libraries like Twisted 
that have their own event loops.  Use the new get_input_descriptors() 
and get_input_nonblocking() methods instead of get_input() when using an 
external event loop.

While I have tried to maintain compatibility with older versions of 
Urwid, some of the changes in this release may affect existing code. 
Please report any problems you have to the mailing list or the IRC channel.

[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.urwid/415
[2] http://excess.org/urwid/browser/contrib/trunk


New in this release:
====================

  * Rendering is now significantly faster.

  * New Widget base class for all widgets. It includes automatic caching
    of rows() and render() methods. It also adds a new __super attribute
    for accessing methods in superclasses.

    Widgets must now call self._invalidate() to notify the cache when
    their content has changed.

    To disable caching in a widget set the class variable no_cache to a
    list that includes the string "render".

  * Canvas classes have been reorganized: Canvas has been renamed to
    TextCanvas and Canvas is now the base class for all canvases. New
    canvas classes include BlankCanvas, SolidCanvas and CompositeCanvas.

  * External event loops may now be used with the raw_display module. The
    new methods get_input_descriptors() and get_input_nonblocking()
    should be used instead of get_input() to allow input processing
    without blocking.

  * The Columns, Pile and ListBox widgets now choose their first
    selectable child widget as the focus widget by defaut.

  * New ListWalker base class for list walker classes.

  * New Signals class that will be used to improve the existing event
    callbacks. Currently it is used for ListWalker objects to notify
    their ListBox when their content has changed.

  * SimpleListWalker now behaves as a list and supports all list
    operations. This class now detects when changes are made to the list
    and notifies the ListBox object. New code should use this class to
    wrap lists of widgets before passing them to the ListBox
    constructor.

  * New PollingListWalker class is now the default list walker that is
    used when passing a simple list to the ListBox constructor. This
    class is intended for backwards compatibility only. When this class
    is used the ListBox object is unable to cache its render() method.

  * The curses_display module can now draw in the lower-right corner of
    the screen.

  * All display modules now have start() and stop() methods that may be
    used instead of calling run_wrapper().

  * The raw_display module now uses an alternate buffer so that the
    original screen can be restored on exit. The old behaviour is
    available by seting the alternate_buffer parameter of start() or
    run_wrapper() to False.

  * Many internal string processing functions have been rewritten in C to
    improve their performance.

  * Compatible with Python >= 2.2. Python 2.1 is no longer supported.


About Urwid
===========

Urwid is a console UI library for Python. It features fluid interface
resizing, UTF-8 support, multiple text layouts, simple attribute markup,
powerful scrolling list boxes and flexible interface design.

Urwid is released under the GNU LGPL.