[Twisted-Python] State of "insults"?

exarkun at twistedmatrix.com exarkun at twistedmatrix.com
Thu Oct 14 11:51:30 EDT 2010


On 13 Oct, 10:08 pm, nathan.stocks at gmail.com wrote:
>JP, what's the current state of the "insults" module you wrote?  I'm
>looking to bolt an ncurses-like client interface onto one of my
>projects, and I didn't want to reinvent the wheel if it had already
>been done, so some diligent searching turned up the "insults" module
>you wrote.
>
>There's almost no examples, and the API documentation seems to consist
>of only method names (which are all very reasonably named), but not
>much in the way of actual descriptions.

Did you find 
<http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/browser/trunk/doc/conch/examples/>?

I'll agree that there's little documentation, but I think the handful of 
examples is pretty good, as examples go.
>Is this a stable, portable module that I can expect to work on OS X
>and Linux, or is it a buggy work-in-progress (or something in
>between)?  Searching the list archives turned up almost no discussion
>about it since 2007.

If you're wondering about the API stability (ie, the backwards 
compatibility promises), they're the same as for the rest of Twisted. 
Things won't change out from under you.

As far as working reliably on multiple platforms, I think it does 
*pretty* well, but I know it has some bugs to be worked out, and the 
sheer number of terminal emulators out there (with their unique set of 
bugs) means that there are probably a lot of configurations in which it 
is sub-par.  I'd consider most such cases bugs to be fixed in insults, 
but someone still needs to fix them for that to help you. ;)
>The biggest benefits I see with ncurses are that it's got tons of
>documentation and I know it will work wherever Python works.
>The benefits I see with insults is that it is designed to work with
>Twisted and seems to have a decent selection of widgets, so I wouldn't
>have to implement too many basic widgets.

I have a couple back-burner projects in which I'm using insults, and I 
don't see changing to anything else.  However, if you'd like another 
option to consider, there's Urwid (and it supports Twisted, too).

Jean-Paul



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