Textual Popup Hack
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As I am toying around with textual, I am wanting some popup user input to take over. Textual is still pretty new and likely to change quite significantly, so...

Date: February 26, 2022

As I am toying around with textual, I am wanting some popup user input to take over. Textual is still pretty new and likely to change quite significantly, so I don’t want to overdo the work I put into it, So for now on my personal tuis I am going to shell out to tmux.

The Problem
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The main issue is that when you are in a textual app, it kinda owns the input. So if you try to run another python function that calls for input it just cant get there. There is a textual-inputs <https://github.com/sirfuzzalot/textual-inputs> library that covers this, and it might work really well for some use cases, but many of my use cases have been for things that are pre-built like copier, and I am trying to throw something together quick.

│ textual is still very beta

Part of this comes down to the fact that textual is still very beta and likely to change a lot, so all of the work I have done with it is for quick and dirty, or fun side projects.

The Solution
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So the solution that was easiest for me… shell out to a tmux popup. The application I am working on wants to create new documents using copier templates. copier has a fantastic cli that walks throught he template variables and asks the user to fill them in, so I just shell out to that with Popen. Make sure that you wait for this process to finish otherwise there will be bit of jank in your textual app.

[code]
  async def action_new_post(self) -> None:
      proc = subprocess.Popen(
          'tmux popup "copier copy plugins/todo-template tasks"', shell=True
      )
      proc.wait()

example
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Here is what the running todo application looks like with the copier popup over it.

Image: example of the popup running over textual <https://images.waylonwalker.com/textual-popup-hack.png>

tmux popups </tmux-popups/>

│ a bit more on tmux-popus [here] https://waylonwalker.com/tmux-popups/)

Links
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- textual repo
- textual-inputs repo
- my article on tmux popups