I've started building a TUI for Lemmy
files.catbox.moe
I'm not sure this is the right community.
I've been hoping for a TUI frontend for Lemmy for a while, but unfortunately none came out and I've decided to build a proof of concept on my own.
It's written in python with pythorhead, blessed and chafa.py and it's quite janky.
I love this. Anything that keeps me in the terminal and out of the browser is a blessing from Tux himself.
Finally a Lemmy client for Linux mobile
That made me laugh so hard. Are there really no clients for linux mobiles?
There wasn't a few months back when I checked
That looks epic!
Please add the ability to view images with an external image viewer as I find a lot of social TUI apps seem to lack that.
Add that and you're making my ideal Lemmy client
Thank you, that's so kind! I'll probably try to tackle the comments first as they come quite messy from the api, then I'll probably give the images a go.
To be honest, I'm hoping this project doesn't get out of my league too quickly as a have almost no experience with working with apis.
You might look into displaying images in the terminal as well; many modern terminals support showing actual images natively
Have you considered supporting Sixel for images?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel
Have you looked at Textual? It probably has more functionality than blessed.
I did, but i was going for something really small and simple, more like an ebook reader than a webui.
+1 for Textual. It's great stuff!
Textual is great, and the community at discord is very helpful and welcoming.
For rendering high quality images in the terminal, check out the Kitty graphical protocol. I don't know if they are any python libraries to use, but I think that they are. P.S. This seems to work well https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58138638/how-to-display-graphical-images-in-kitty-terminal-using-python
I went with chafa as it's terminal agnostic and supports various modes.
Then again, I'm not really sure a tui frontend needs high quality image rendering. Earlier I even considered going completely 1bit braille or just ASCII just so that the image doesn't take all of the focus at the expense of the post body.
As mentioned by another commenter, I believe opening the full image in an external viewer is a much better solution, not to mention easier to implement.
You could also look into using sixel. It's kinda like the kitty protocol but older and terminal agnostic.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel
Thanks, I've only heard of sixel, but never really read into it. Sounds promising.
A suggestion is do it like neofetch and let the user choose. Amazing work.
does this protocol work for other terminals? such as alacritty, foot, urxvt, or even st (with appropriate patch ofc)?
A quick research tells me that there aren't patches for other emulators, but the protocol seems well described, so making those patches is possible. I could also take a look at Alacritty source code and deicide if I could make this project work.
There is one named neonmodem overdrive but it is buggy. It also support discourse forums any plan for this?
It really is buggy, iirc I couldn't even get it to run properly.
I really don't have any plans (or even a name) for the app, as I've just started playing around with pythorhead yesterday. I just hoped posting a prototype or a proof of concept might spark a discussion and maybe inspire someone much more competent than me.
Fine I thought u were somewhere.🥲
I would not recommend working on two GUI's at once, but if you build it in a way you can use different frameworks for it, the maker of Rich also makes a nice TUI framework API called Textual.
Here's some projects made with it for a sample of what it's usage can look like: https://www.textualize.io/projects/
I believe it does not use curses at all.
Wish someone would come with something like tut for mastodon.
While complex tuis are definitely not my cup of tea (I prefer cli tools to be simple, otherwise I would probably use a proper gui), I'm really happy that I'm not the only one wishing for a way to access lemmy from the terminal.
I’m too working on a TUI to browse the-eye.eu, I’m still struggling with asynchronous render & Rust.
Async programming is really quite hard to wrap your head around. Currently I'm mostly struggling with excessive memory consumption.
Send help I’m struggling with lifetimes, unbounded channel & implementing EventHandler… <3
Link returns "This site can’t be reachedThe webpage at https://files.catbox.moe/8g7agm.mp4 might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.".
Do you have a github or codeberg link?
Maybe we should add it to awesome-lemmy?.
It seems to be working for me.
I didn't think anyone would have interest in it so i haven't uploaded it. After new year's I could clean it up a bit and host it on github.
I think it may be e a bit too early for that. At the current state it supports dynamic fetching of the feed in the background (quite buggy), paginating and displaying long posts and displaying top level comments only. At the current state it's quite enough for me to enjoy a few (more like a few dozen) posts, but definitely not anywhere close to "awesome".
He's a mad man, a mad man!
But cool! Any hopes for image and video support?
Looks good! You might want to join forces with https://github.com/LunaticHacker/lemmy-terminal-viewer
Something like rtv would be great!
How did you upload a video?
Uploaded it to catbox.moe and then just pasted the link in the url field when creating the post. Hope that helps :)
One reason more to stop with the silly text-in-image posts. There's a text-only post option, you know guys? Lemmy is not Instagram.
FYI see https://github.com/mrusme/neonmodem
There's TIV/FIM/imgfb if you're looking for ways to render images in terminal. Or convert them to sixel.