A few questions about testing

[ckipp01]

So while writing some tests I noticed that I was copying quite a bit of logic that you used in here for some of the widgets. For example I used:

• Your TestBackend.scala verbatim
• Your assertBuffer method
• Your BufferView

What do you think of publishing some sort of test-utils package with some of this stuff extracted out so that users could re-use some of it. Would you be open to a PR exploring this?

One thing I had a somewhat hard time with figuring out how to test was colors/modifiers. I noticed that in some of your tests you do this sort of thing where you go over the expected ranges and apply a modifier to them. That works for small things, but having a full UI with various colors/dim/bold text gets really hard to follow that pattern with. One way around this for me was to make a copy of diffBuffers with the key difference being it only compares the actual symbols. Would you be open to a small change that maybe deprecates this method and adds another that has a flag that can be turned on or off to do a full diff that includes things like modifiers, vs a more minimal one that just does the symbols?

[oyvindberg]

Absolutely, it makes a lot of sense to publish some test helpers :)

I've had the same frustrations as you're having when working with tests for this. Comparing symbols is relatively easy, and comparing modifiers and colors is quite hard. Any progress towards a better solution is good 👍
Note that all the test patterns you're seeing are ported 1-1 from tui-rs, so I haven't really invested any time into it yet.

The thing I would really want to do is actually render the screens and compare with a checked in version, like snapshot tests. Not sure how to proceed in that direction however.