urwid (original) (raw)

About

Urwid is a console user interface library for Python on Linux, OSX, Cygwin or other unix-like OS and partially supports Windows OS (see below).

It includes many features useful for text console application developers including:

Applications resize quickly and smoothly
Automatic, programmable text alignment and wrapping
Simple markup for setting text attributes within blocks of text
Powerful list box with programmable content for scrolling all widget types
Your choice of event loops: Twisted, Glib, Tornado, asyncio, trio, ZeroMQ or select-based loop
Pre-built widgets include edit boxes, buttons, check boxes and radio buttons
Display modules include raw, curses, and experimental LCD and web displays
Support for UTF-8, simple 8-bit and CJK encodings
24-bit (true color), 256 color, and 88 color mode support
Compatible with Python 3.7+ and PyPy

Home Page:

http://urwid.org/

Installation

To install using pip

pip install urwid

For advanced functionality extra requirements need to be installed. Example for ZeroMQ event loop and LCD display:

pip install urwid[serial,zmq]

Alternatively if you are on Debian or Ubuntu

apt-get install python3-urwid

Windows support notes

Not supported:

Terminal widget and all related render API (TermCanvas, TermCharset, TermModes, TermScroller)
Any file descriptors except sockets (Windows OS limitation)
ZMQEventLoop.

Special requirements:

Extra libraries required for curses display support:

pip install urwid[curses]

CursesDisplay incorrectly handles mouse input in case of fast actions.
Only UTF-8 mode is supported.

Testing

To run tests locally, install & run tox. You must have appropriate Python versions installed to run tox for each of them.

To test code in all Python versions:

tox                     # Test all versions specified in tox.ini:
tox -e py39             # Test Python 3.9 only
tox -e py39,py10,pypy3  # Test Python 3.9, Python 3.10 & pypy3

Supported Python versions

3.9
3.10
3.11
3.12
3.13
pypy3

Authors