Textual has devtools in the upcoming css branch, and its pretty awesome!
It’s still early #
Textual is still very early and not really ready for prime time, but it’s quite amazing how easy some things such as creating keybindings is. The docs are coming, but missing right now so if you want to use textual be ready for reading source code and examples.
On to the devtools #
As @willmcgugan shows in this tweet it’s pretty easy to setup, it requires having two terminals open, or using tmux, and currently you have to use the css branch.
https://twitter.com/willmcgugan/status/1531294412696956930
Why does textual need its own devtools #
Textual is a tui application framework. Unlike when you are building cli applications, when the tui takes over the terminal in full screen there is no where to print statement debug, and breakpoints don’t work.
getting the css branch #
In the future it will likely be in main and not need this, but for now you need to get the css branch to get devtools.
git clone https://github.com/Textualize/textual
git fetch --alll
git checkout css
install in a virtual environment #
Now you can create a virtual environment, feel free to use whatever virtual environment tool you want, venv is built in to most python distributions though, and should just be there.
python3 -m venv .venv --prompt textual
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install .
Now that we have textual installed #
Once textual is installed you can open up the devtools by running textual console.
textual console
