Pytabby 0.1.0

Description:

pytabby 0.1.0

A flexible, non-opinionated, tabbed menu system to interactively control program flow for
terminal-based programs. It’s a class with one sole public method which runs in a while
loop as you switch tabs (if you want tabs, that is; you’re free not to have any) or if you
enter invalid input, and then returns a string based on the value you selected that
you can use to control the outer program flow.
Of course, you can run the class itself in a while loop in the enclosing program, getting
menu choice after menu choice returned as you navigate a program.

Installation
pip install pytabby
Meow.

Usage
from pytabby import Menu
myconfig = Menu.safe_read_yaml('path/to/yaml')
# or Menu.read_json() or just pass a dict in the next step
mymenu = Menu(myconfig)
result = mymenu.run()

if result == 'result1':
do_this_interesting_thing()
elif result == 'result2':
do_this_other_thing()
# etc...

See it in action!

FAQ

*Why did you make this?
Well, it was one of those typical GitHub/PyPI scenarios, I wanted a specific thing,
so I made a specific thing and then I took >10X the time making it a project so that
others can use the thing; maybe some people will find it useful, maybe not.
I like running programs in the terminal, and this allowed me to put a bunch of
utilities like duplicate file finders and bulk file renamers all under one
umbrella. If you prefer GUIs, there are plenty of simple wrappers out there,

Why can’t I return handlers?
Out of scope for this project at this time, but it’s on the
Wish List. For now, the Menu instance just returns strings
which the outer closure can then use to control program flow,
including defining handlers using control flow/if statement
based on the string returned by Menu.run().

Why are my return values coming in/out strings?
To keep things simple, all input and output (return) values are
converted to string. So if you have
config['tabs'][0]['items][0]['item_returns'] = 1,
the return value will be ‘1’.

Why do ‘items’ have both ‘item_choice_displayed’ and ‘item_inputs’ keys?
To keep things flexible, you don’t have to display exactly
what you’ll accept as input. For example, you could display
‘yes/no’ as the suggested answers to a yes or no question, but
actually accept [‘y’, ‘n’, ‘yes’, ‘no’], etc.

I have ‘case_sensitive’ = False, but my return value is still uppercase.
case_sensitive only affects inputs, not outputs

What’s up with passing a dict with the tab name as a message to Menu.run()?
The message might be different depending on the tab, and run()
only exits when it returns a value when given a valid item input.
It changes tabs in a loop, keeping that implementation detail
abstracted away from the user, as is right.

Dependencies

PyYAML>=5.1
schema>=0.7.0

Wish List:

a way to dynamically silence (“grey out”, if this were a GUI menu system)
certain menu items, which may be desired during program flow, probably by
passing a list of silenced tab names and return values
have an option to accept single keypresses instead of multiple keys and
ENTER with the input() function, using msvcrt package in Windows
or tty and termios in Mac/Linux. (This will make coverage platform-
dependent, so it will have to be cumulative on travis and appveyor)

Photo Credit
Erik-Jan Leusink via Unsplash