[IPython-dev] Frontend: curses or urwid?

[Fernando Perez]

Hi Wendell,

On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 2:13 AM, Wendell Smith <wackywendell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This is a big decision: urwid is very different from plain curses, and it
> would be very difficult to switch later. What do you think?

It does sound like an important decision; some things to keep in mind:

- does it look like urwid is well maintained/alive?  You don't want to
have a dependency that has stalled (we have a bit of that with nose,
for example, though only for testing).

- Can it be easy_installed, and does that work well on all platforms?


You may want to play with a very simple example firsts before diving
into all  the ipython complexities, and prototype it both with curses
and urwid.  That will be a very informative exercise that even if it
takes a little time now, will likely save you a lot in the long run.

I'll post more details tomorrow, but I'd encourage you to play with this code:

http://github.com/ellisonbg/pyzmq/tree/kernel/examples/kernel/

Brian and I just finished a 2-day sprint on this, and we're *super*
excited.  It looks like with zmq we're going to have all the pieces
for really clean asynchronous clients.

To run it, open 3 terminals, and run kernel.py in one and frontend.py
in the other two.  Then, type away in both frontends :)

Cheers,

f