textual/docs/introduction.md

Introduction

Welcome to the Textual Introduction!

By the end of this page you should have a good idea of the steps involved in creating an application with Textual.

Stopwatch Application

We're going to build a stopwatch app. This app will display the elapsed time since the user hit a "Start" button. The user will be able to stop / resume / reset each stopwatch in addition to adding or removing them.

This is a simple yet fully featured app — you could distribute this app if you wanted to!

Here's what the finished app will look like:

If you want to try this out before reading the rest of this introduction (we recommend it), navigate to "docs/examples/introduction" within the repository and run the following:

python stopwatch.py

The App class

The first step in building a Textual app is to import and extend the App class. Here's our basic app class with a few methods which we will cover below.

--8<-- "docs/examples/introduction/stopwatch01.py"

If you run this code, you should see something like the following:

Hit the ++d++ key to toggle dark mode.

Hit ++ctrl+c++ to exit the app and return to the command prompt.

Looking at the code

Let's examine stopwatch01.py in more detail.

--8<-- "docs/examples/introduction/stopwatch01.py"

The first line imports the Textual App class. The second line imports two builtin widgets: Footer which shows available keys and Header which shows a title and the current time.

Widgets are re-usable components responsible for managing a part of the screen. We will cover how to build such widgets in this introduction.

--8<-- "docs/examples/introduction/stopwatch01.py"

The App class is where most of the logic of Textual apps is written. It is responsible for loading configuration, setting up widgets, handling keys, and more.

There are three methods in our stopwatch app currently.

• compose() is where we construct a user interface with widgets. The compose() method may return a list of widgets, but it is generally easier to yield them (making this method a generator). In the example code we yield instances of the widget classes we imported, i.e. the header and the footer.

• on_load() is an event handler method. Event handlers are called by Textual in response to external events like keys and mouse movements, and internal events needed to manage your application. Event handler methods begin with on_ followed by the name of the event (in lower case). Hence, on_load it is called in response to the Load event which is sent just after the app starts. We're using this event to call App.bind() which connects a key to an action.

• action_toggle_dark() defines an action method. Actions are methods beginning with action_ followed by the name of the action. The call to bind() in on_load() binds this the ++d++ key to this action. The body of this method flips the state of the dark boolean to toggle dark mode.

!!! note

You may have noticed that the the `toggle_dark` doesn't do anything to explicitly change the _screen_, and yet hitting ++d++ refreshes and updates the whole terminal. This is an example of _reactivity_. Changing certain attributes will schedule an automatic update.

--8<-- "docs/examples/introduction/stopwatch01.py"

The last lines in "stopwatch01.py" may be familiar to you. We create an instance of our app class, and call run() within a __name__ == "__main__" conditional block. This is so that we could import app if we want to. Or we could run it with python stopwatch01.py.

Creating a custom widget

The header and footer were builtin widgets. We will to build a custom widget for the stopwatches in our application.

Let's sketch out what we are trying to achieve here:

--8<-- "docs/images/stopwatch.excalidraw.svg"

An individual stopwatch consists of several parts, which themselves can be widgets.

The Stopwatch widget consists of the be built with the following child widgets:

• A "start" button
• A "stop" button
• A "reset" button
• A time display

Textual has a builtin Button widgets which takes care of the first three components. All we need to build is the time display which will show the elapsed time in HOURS:MINUTES:SECONDS format, and the stopwatch itself.

Let's add those to our app:

--8<-- "docs/examples/introduction/stopwatch02.py"

New widgets

We've imported two new widgets in this code: Button, which creates a clickable button, and Static which is a base class for a simple control. We've also imported Container from textual.layout. As the name suggests, Container is a Widget which contains other widgets. We will use this container to create a scrolling list of stopwatches.

We're extending Static as a foundation for our TimeDisplay widget. There are no methods on this class yet.

The Stopwatch class also extends Static to define a new widget. This class has a compose() method which yields its child widgets, consisting of of three Button objects and a single TimeDisplay. These are all we need to build a stopwatch as in the sketch.

The Button constructor takes a label to be displayed in the button ("Start", "Stop", or "Reset"). There are two additional parameters to the Button constructor we are using:

• id is an identifier we can use to tell the buttons apart in code and apply styles. More on that later.
• variant is a string which selects a default style. The "success" variant makes the button green, and the "error" variant makes it red.

Composing the widgets

To see our widgets with we first need to yield them from the app's compose() method:

The new line in Stopwatch.compose() yields a single Container object which will create a scrolling list. When classes contain other widgets (like Container) they will typically accept their child widgets as positional arguments. We want to start the app with three stopwatches, so we construct three Stopwatch instances as child widgets of the container.

The unstyled app

Let's see what happens when we run "stopwatch02.py":

The elements of the stopwatch application are there. The buttons are clickable and you can scroll the container, but it doesn't look much like the sketch. This is because we have yet to apply any styles to our new widget.

Writing Textual CSS

Every widget has a styles object which contains information regarding how that widget will look. Setting any of the attributes on that styles object will change how Textual displays the widget.

Here's how you might set white text and a blue background for a widget:

self.styles.background = "blue"
self.styles.color = "white"

While its possible to set all styles for an app this way, Textual prefers to use CSS.

CSS files are data files loaded by your app which contain information about styles to apply to your widgets.

!!! note

Don't worry if you have never worked with CSS before. The dialect of CSS we use is greatly simplified over web based CSS and easy to learn!

Let's add a CSS file to our application.

--8<-- "docs/examples/introduction/stopwatch03.py"

Adding the css_path attribute to the app constructor tells textual to load the following file when it starts the app:

--8<-- "docs/examples/introduction/stopwatch03.css"

If we run the app now, it will look very different.

This app looks much more like our sketch. Textual has read style information from stopwatch03.css and applied it to the widgets.

CSS basics

CSS files contain a number of declaration blocks. Here's the first such block from stopwatch03.css again:

Stopwatch {
    layout: horizontal;
    background: $panel-darken-1;
    height: 5;
    padding: 1;
    margin: 1;
}

The first line tells Textual that the styles should apply to the Stopwatch widget. The lines between the curly brackets contain the styles themselves.

Here's how the Stopwatch block in the CSS impacts our Stopwatch widget:

--8<-- "docs/images/stopwatch_widgets.excalidraw.svg"

• layout: horizontal aligns child widgets horizontally from left to right.
• background: $panel-darken-1 sets the background color to $panel-darken-1. The $ prefix picks a pre-defined color from the builtin theme. There are other ways to specify colors such as "blue" or rgb(20,46,210).
• height: 5 sets the height of our widget to 5 lines of text.
• padding: 1 sets a padding of 1 cell around the child widgets.
• margin: 1 sets a margin of 1 cell around the Stopwatch widget to create a little space between widgets in the list.

Here's the rest of stopwatch03.css which contains further declaration blocks:

TimeDisplay {
    content-align: center middle;
    opacity: 60%;
    height: 3;
}

Button {
    width: 16;    
}

#start {
    dock: left;
}

#stop {
    dock: left;
    display: none;
}

#reset {
    dock: right;
}

The TimeDisplay block aligns text to the center (content-align), fades it slightly (opacity), and sets its height (height) to 3 lines.

The Button block sets the width (width) of buttons to 16 cells (character widths).

The last 3 blocks have a slightly different format. When the declaration begins with a # then the styles will be applied widgets with a matching "id" attribute. We've set an ID attribute on the Button widgets we yielded in compose. For instance the first button has id="start" which matches #start in the CSS.

The buttons have a dock style which aligns the widget to a given edge. The start and stop buttons are docked to the left edge, while the reset button is docked to the right edge.

You may have noticed that the stop button (#stop in the CSS) has display: none;. This tells Textual to not show the button. We do this because we don't want to dsplay the stop button when the timer is not running. Similarly we don't want to show the start button when the timer is running. We will cover how to manage such dynamic user interfaces in the next section.

Dynamic CSS

We want our Stopwatch widget to have two states. An unstarted state with a Start and Reset button, and a started state with a Stop button.

There are other visual differences between the two states. When a stopwatch is running it should have a green background and bold text.