A group of crows is called a mur­der of crows. A group of hares is called a coun­cil of hares.

In fac­t, that's just a bunch of things vic­to­ri­ans made up be­cause they had lots of free time and they had­n't in­vent­ed the In­ter­net yet, and most of those were nev­er ac­tu­al­ly wide­ly used.

BUT what's the name for a group of things that are in a min­i­mal­ly vi­able state?

Well, Co­braPy, my 80s-style python pro­gram­ming en­vi­ron­ment is slow­ly crawl­ing in­to be­com­ing one of those.

Of the com­po­nents I wan­t, I have one of each. They all suck but they suck in the same way a 3 year old play­ing pool suck­s. He will not be great but it's still cool.

• I am go­ing to punt in hav­ing the ed­i­tor I want be­cause I can make do with Mi­cro for the time be­ing (works flaw­less­ly in my ter­mi­nal!)
• The RE­PL is not great but it can do what it can do
• The graph­ics serv­er works (although its API is lim­it­ed to draw­ing cir­cles)
• The ter­mi­nal is bet­ter than ex­pect­ed, could re­al­ly be used as a dai­ly driv­er ex­cept for some pro­grams re­al­ly not lik­ing it.

And al­so, I have com­bined all the things so that you can start a win­dow that:

• Is a ter­mi­nal
• That runs the re­pl
• Where you can use the graph­ics API
• And it dis­plays in the same win­dow

Lis­to.

Sigu­iente ob­je­tivo: agre­gar un ed­i­tor "modal" pic.twit­ter.­com/W­fI2Ow00lT

— Rober­to H. Alsi­na (@ralsi­na) October 13, 2020

What nex­t? I could think about what nex­t. Or ...

I could try to write a sim­ple game and im­ple­ment all the things that don't ex­ist.

Ex­cept for in­put. I need to solve how to do in­put. You see, the user-cre­at­ed pro­grams don't run in the same space as the win­dow. That's why we have a graph­ics pro­to­col. The pro­gram puts things in it, the win­dow reads them and graph­ics ap­pear.

But in­put needs to go the oth­er way around. So I need to add a sec­ond pro­to­col to send back events and it needs to be pret­ty fast. I don't think it's go­ing to be a prob­lem (us­er ac­tions hap­pen on­ly once ev­ery few dozens of mil­lisec­ond­s!) but af­ter that's done?

It's go­ing to be time for ...

Or ac­tu­al­ly, to fail at im­ple­ment­ing it, but im­prov­ing the plat­form in the process. Be­cause fail­ure is what im­prove­ments are made of.

As it hap­pens in ear­ly stages in fun prod­uct­s, progress in Co­braPy has been both faster and slow­er than ex­pect­ed.

In the past few days a num­ber of things hap­pened:

I made that terminal a whole lot nicer

I al­ready had a ter­mi­nal but I fixed a num­ber of things.

• The key­board han­dling is much bet­ter, it now rec­og­nizes pret­ty much all keys, which is al­ways a nice thing.
• It sor­ta sup­ports things like "á" via mod­e-switch (no dead­keys sup­port prob­a­bly ev­er)
• It has 24-bit col­or sup­port! I did­n't know ter­mi­nals could sup­port that kind of thing!

I added a graphics protocol to it!

Ter­mi­nals with graph­ics sup­port have a very long tra­di­tion. This is a VT55, re­leased in 1977 dis­play­ing graph­ic­s:

How did it work? Well you can read the pro­gram­mer's man­u­al if you wan­t, but ba­si­cal­ly you sent a con­trol se­quence that put it in "graph­ics mod­e" and then sent com­mands de­scrib­ing what to dis­play.

Sim­i­lar ideas with dif­fer­ent pro­to­col de­tails were used in many dif­fer­ent fu­ture ter­mi­nal­s, in­clud­ing ReG­IS graph­ics and Tek­tron­ix vec­tor graph­ics and you could even trace this all the way to a cur­rent Lin­ux desk­top's X11 graph­ic­s.

So, what did I do? Not that, ex­act­ly. I am cre­at­ing a side-chan­nel as a sort-of-R­PC where you send se­ri­al­ized python method names and ar­gu­ments.

I wrote a Python REPL

I want­ed an in­ter­ac­tive mode that was slight­ly friend­lier than Python comes with, but not some­thing over­whelm­ing and pow­er­ful like IPython or BPython.

I did some re­search, and found pt­python which is pret­ty awe­some, but still a bit too much awe­some.

And then I start­ed on a much, much lamer ver­sion of it. Still em­bri­on­ic, but it does work. I have some plans for it.

I learned a lot more about Raylib

All the graph­ics and ba­si­cal­ly ev­ery­thing you see in this project is done us­ing the awe­some raylib and a home­grown CF­FI bind­ing for it. I was not us­ing it right, now I use it bet­ter, and things that took sev­er­al hun­dredth sec­onds now take a few dozen mi­crosec­ond­s.

I integrated the whole thing, sorta

So, I in­te­grat­ed it enough that you can start the ter­mi­nal, launch the RE­PL in it, and use the graph­ics pro­to­col to draw some­thing!

Por otro lado, el que dibu­jar 10 cír­cu­los us­an­do IPC tarde 20 se­gun­dos sí hay que op­ti­mizar­lo aho­ra :-) pic.twit­ter.­com/0y­wf9nzxkH

— Rober­to H. Alsi­na (@ralsi­na) October 11, 2020

What next

Now comes a round of in­te­gra­tion, cleanup and op­ti­miza­tion.

• Work­ing code needs to be re­or­ga­nized
• The ter­mi­nal us­es 66% of a CPU core, which is not ac­cept­able, but there's tons of low hang­ing fruit there.
• Graph­ics pro­to­col needs to be able to do more things so it's in­ter­est­ing

Af­ter that will come a new round of fea­ture work, and so on for the next ... 10 years? If it goes well?

Co­braPy is in large part about rein­vent­ing wheel­s. We do, af­ter al­l, have per­fect­ly fine 80s-style de­vel­op­ment en­vi­ron­ments in the mil­lions of 80s com­put­ers float­ing around, as well as em­u­la­tors, things like the Maximite and so on.

How­ev­er, I on­ly want to rein­vent fun wheel­s, so I am not do­ing a text ed­i­tor. And prob­a­bly gonna hack a ter­mi­nal-based RE­PL. And there's no way I am do­ing my own wifi con­fig tool (again) so, I should have a reg­u­lar, or­di­nary ter­mi­nal.

But the things I want that ter­mi­nal to do are ... un­usu­al, like raster graph­ic­s, and sprites. So ... why not do my own ter­mi­nal for this?

It's not the first ter­mi­nal I write! I wrote a dumb ter­mi­nal em­u­la­tor around 1998 and I wrote a very ba­sic one us­ing python, pygame and pyte a few months ago. It's on video!

But this time I want­ed a bet­ter one, since I want this to look good. So I went and wrote one.

It us­es many 3rd par­ty things, be­cause life is short.

• Pyte for all the nit­ty grit­ty of ter­mi­nal em­u­la­tion
• raylib for all the graph­ics
• mon­oid is the font
• This page helped me with things like "what was the es­cape code for left­????"

And it looks this nice:

Yes, NICE, Stu­ar­t.

stop be­fore I claw my own eyes out

— Stu­art Lan­gridge (@sil) October 8, 2020

Yes­ter­day I was try­ing to fig­ure ou­ut some ob­scure in­put things in Co­braPy such as "de­tect­ing the En­ter key" and ran in­to a love­ly pack­age in PyP­I: Pym­put

What does it do? It lets you in­ject and read in­put events.

And by in­put events I mean mouse and­key­board.

And it does so in your whole ses­sion.

And you would­n't no­tice if it was do­ing that.

And it does this in 20 lines of friend­ly python code. Here, have a key­board snif­fer:

from pynput import keyboard

def on_press(key):
    try:
        print('alphanumeric key {0} pressed'.format(
            key.char))
    except AttributeError:
        print('special key {0} pressed'.format(
            key))

def on_release(key):
    print('{0} released'.format(
        key))
    if key == keyboard.Key.esc:
        # Stop listener
        return False

# Collect events until released
with keyboard.Listener(
        on_press=on_press,
        on_release=on_release) as listener:
    listener.join()

This is one of the rea­sons why Way­land (or Mir, I re­mem­ber Mir!) needs to hap­pen. It's triv­ial for any desk­top app to mon­i­tor ev­ery­thing you do. Of course nowa­days you al­so will see soft­ware ad­ver­tis­ing this, as a "fea­ture" where it's used to "mon­i­tor em­ploy­ee pro­duc­tiv­i­ty".

Be­cause re­mem­ber, of­ten things are on­ly il­le­gal when in­di­vid­u­als do them, if you are a com­pa­ny and are charg­ing for it, then Bob's your un­cle.

I went and did a thing. But why, why?

When I start­ed play­ing with the idea of do­ing a sort-of-retro-80s-pro­gram­ming-en­vi­ron­ment called Co­braPy I sus­pect­ed one of the prob­lems would be find­ing a graph­ics li­brary that did what I want­ed and had good per­for­mance.

I have used PyGame a lit­tle in the past but nev­er liked it too much, so I tried Py­glet and it was work­ing great ... un­til I tried to add some­thing as sim­ple as a wid­get to en­ter tex­t. It does­n't re­al­ly do wid­get­s, for that you ap­par­ent­ly use glooey

But glooey is ... I don't like it. And then I ran into a bug where you can either clean the contents of an EditableLabel and set it to focused without it crashing deep in its bowels. I worked around it by using fake mouse events to focus. And then noticed you can't type a double quote in one of those widgets. So, I got pissed.

It lit­er­al­ly took me less time to find a nice C game li­brary, read a tu­to­ri­al on CF­FI, do min­i­mal ed­its to its head­er file, learn how to use in­voke and write my first pro­gram us­ing it than I wast­ed chas­ing that glooey bug.

I may have hat­ed py­glet + glooey so much I just went and looked for a nice C game li­brary and did a wrap­per in 10 min­utes us­ing cf­fi. pic.twit­ter.­com/fEamIs5zQz

— Rober­to H. Alsi­na (@ralsi­na) October 7, 2020

And now, the ques­tion­s:

• Does it work well? How could I know, I on­ly wrote the bind­ing, I have not used it yet!
• Will I main­tain it? I don't think it re­quires much main­tain­ing.
• Will I re­lease it? Maybe. It's here, mixed up with oth­er stuff

... aaaaand some­one else had al­ready done it. http­s://pyp­i.org/pro­jec­t/raylib/ But that's raylib 2.6, cur­rent is 3.0 :-)