[Twisted-Python] State of "insults"?

[Nathan]

On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 9:51 AM,  <exarkun at twistedmatrix.com> wrote:
> 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).

Okay, so it sounds like I need to sit down and do a side-by-side
comparison between curses, insults, and urwid before I can make an
intelligent decision.

Why do terminal frameworks have such wacky names?  Sheesh...

~ Nathan