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Showing posts from January, 2024

Terminal UI the Easy Way: BubbleTEA

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For the past 18 months I've been tinkering with a terminal application that serves as an Algorand node frontend. I had a number of requirements in mind when choosing the technology: a full screen terminal application, works over ssh, extensible to allow it to evolve with different utilities and views of the system over time, be programmed with the Go programming language.  In the past I've created these sorts of programs with bash, but it's not fun to manage terminal control characters and deal with re-drawing with bash. Using bash has always led my applications to be simplistic, typically never getting beyond simple spinners and progress bars. I knew about ncurses, but didn't want to lose the portability of bash -- some of these scripts were even POSIX compliant, and honestly I just didn't want to deal with low level interfaces and C bindings. Enter bubbletea . The team at Charm has built the tools I didn't even know I needed. There is an impressive array of d