cozy_tui

A lightweight, cross-platform Python TUI (Terminal User Interface) library. Build keyboard-driven terminal apps with widgets, focus management, mouse support, and smooth cursor blinking — all rendered through raw VT sequences. Runs on Windows (Console API) and POSIX (Linux/macOS via termios).

_{Over 30 built-in themes, switchable at runtime — set_theme(...) re-colors a running app, and Ctrl+T opens a searchable picker.}

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Changes are tracked in CHANGELOG.md.

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Showcase

Every one of these is a runnable example in examples/ — and each doubles as a stress test for a different part of the library.

2048 — truecolor tiles that auto-downgrade on 16/256-color terminals, arrow keys or a mouse drag to swipe, and a modal overlay for win/lose.	Snake — a custom widget painting the field cell-by-cell, driven by app.tick_interval so game logic is decoupled from the render rate.	Calculator — a VBox/HBox keypad of multi-row buttons, driveable entirely from the keyboard.

_{Command palette — Ctrl+P fuzzy-searches every registered command. Quit, Change Theme, and Keys are built in; add your own with app.register_command(...).}

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Documentation

Full documentation lives in docs/ (GitHub) directory:

• Core Concepts — the render loop, coordinate system, and widget lifecycle.
• Widgets — every widget: App, Box, Label, Hyperlink, Bindings, Rule, Code, CodeInput, Diff, Text, Markdown, MarkdownInput, Input, Button, Checkbox, Slider, DropFilesArea, SearchBar, ListView, CheckList, RadioSet, RightClickMenu, MenuBar, Dropdown, ProgressBar, Spinner, Sparkline, BarChart, Calendar, Image, Toast, Tooltip, Table, Tabs, ScrollView, Log, Splitter, Collapsible, Tree, AnimatedLabel, TracebackView.
• Layouts, Dock & Overlays — VBox/HBox/Grid, app.dock(...), and the overlay/modal layer (open_overlay, app.prompt, app.confirm, app.pick_file).
• Styling — Style, colors, text attributes, and Themes.
• Input & Interaction — key bindings, mouse support, focus, scrolling, and the Ctrl+P command palette.
• Testing — cozy_tui.testing.Harness: drive an app headlessly, with virtual time.
• Examples — runnable demos in examples/.

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Features

• Cross-platform — runs on Windows (Console API) and POSIX (Linux/macOS via termios); the backend is chosen automatically.
• Very few dependencies — the clipboard is built in (no pyperclip); the only third-party dependency is rich, used to render Markdown/MarkdownInput and to syntax-highlight TracebackView/show_traceback. Everything else is the standard library.
• Built-in clipboard — cozy_tui.clipboard.copy/paste with native backends per platform (Win32 API, pbcopy/pbpaste, wl-clipboard/xclip/xsel, or OSC 52 fallback).
• Unicode-aware rendering — a built-in wcwidth-style width layer keeps CJK/emoji (double-width) and combining marks (zero-width) aligned in the cell grid.
• Widgets: Button, Checkbox, Input, Slider, Label, Hyperlink, Bindings, Rule, AnimatedLabel, Code, CodeInput, Diff, Text, Box, Markdown, MarkdownInput, DropFilesArea, SearchBar, ListView, CheckList, RadioSet, RightClickMenu, MenuBar, Dropdown, ProgressBar, Spinner, Sparkline, BarChart, Calendar, Image, Toast, Tooltip, Table, Tabs, ScrollView, Log, Splitter, Collapsible, Tree, TracebackView
• Testing harness: cozy_tui.testing.Harness drives your app headlessly — ui.click(button), ui.type("hello"), assert "Saved!" in ui — with virtual time (ui.advance(30) fires a 30-second timer instantly, nothing sleeps) and no escape sequences in your test output; see testing.md
• Reactive state: State("Downloads") is an observable value — pass it as a widget's text/title/progress and the widget follows every state.value = ..., with one state free to drive as many widgets as you like. Explicit by design (a plain str is never reactive) and one-way; see concepts.md
• Themes: a Theme bundles the accent/muted/semantic/selection colors most widgets and app.toast(...) draw from; switch with set_theme(theme)/theme.activate(), or interactively via the Ctrl+T searchable picker (over 30 built-in presets in Theme.MODES) — see styling.md
• Command palette: Ctrl+P opens a Textual-style searchable list of commands (app.register_command(...) to add your own) — Quit, Change Theme, and Keys (a live keybindings legend) are built in
• Crash screens: unhandled exceptions in app.run() automatically show a full-screen, scrollable, syntax-highlighted TracebackView with one-key clipboard copy (App(catch_errors=False) to get a plain propagating exception instead); call cozy_tui.crash_screen.show_traceback(exc) directly to get the same screen outside of run()
• Context menus: RightClickMenu with icons, shortcut labels, and submenus — pop it up from app.on_right_click(...); MenuBar docks the same building blocks to the top of the screen as a File/Edit-style menu bar
• Layouts: VBox, HBox, Grid — auto-position children without manual x/y, with flex= to grow docked children into leftover space; Splitter for a user-resizable two-pane divider
• Dock layout: app.dock(widget, "top"/"bottom"/"left"/"right"/"fill") — edge-anchored regions that re-flow on resize
• Overlays & modals: app.open_overlay(widget) floats a widget above the UI, dims the background, and confines focus/input — the basis for dialogs (app.prompt, app.confirm, app.pick_file), menus, and tooltips (app.set_tooltip)
• Input validation: Input(inp_type="number") filters keystrokes to valid numbers as you type; required=/validator= plus .error/.is_valid for anything else, with automatic error-color styling
• Multi-line Input: Enter or Shift+Enter to insert newlines, UP/DOWN to navigate lines
• Markdown preview: MarkdownInput renders live Rich Markdown when unfocused
• Focus system: Tab / Shift+Tab to cycle focus, click to focus with mouse
• Cursor blinking: Uses the real terminal cursor — smooth blink with no character replacement
• Mouse support: Click to focus widgets, click to activate buttons, scroll wheel to scroll
• Scrolling: Long content scrolls vertically; single-line inputs scroll horizontally
• Global key handlers: Register app-wide shortcuts with app.on_key()
• Flexible styling: Per-widget foreground, background, and text styles (bold, dim, underline)

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Requirements

• Python 3.10+
• A VT-capable terminal on Windows (Windows Console API) or POSIX (Linux/macOS, via termios/tty). The console backend is selected automatically at import.

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Installation

pip install cozy-tui

That's it — rich (used to render Markdown/MarkdownInput and to syntax-highlight TracebackView) is pulled in automatically.

Take it for a spin with the built-in demo:

cozy-tui              # or: python -m cozy_tui

Command-line

Installing the package also provides a cozy-tui command (equivalently python -m cozy_tui):

cozy-tui              # launch the interactive demo (no subcommand)
cozy-tui demo         # launch the interactive demo
cozy-tui --version    # print the installed version
cozy-tui doctor       # check Python, imports, clipboard backend, color depth, PyPI version
cozy-tui doctor --offline   # skip the PyPI check
cozy-tui info         # version + detected terminal capabilities
cozy-tui run script.py           # run a script, like `python script.py`
cozy-tui run --debug script.py   # ...with App(debug=True) on, no code change needed

Then in your script:

from cozy_tui import App, Style
from cozy_tui.widgets import Box, Label, Input, Button

From source (for development)

git clone https://github.com/youssefahmed2017/cozy_tui.git
cd cozy_tui
pip install -e .            # add [dev] for the test suite (pytest)

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Quick Start

from cozy_tui import App, Style
from cozy_tui.widgets import Box, Label, Input, Button, Checkbox
from cozy_tui.events import Key

app = App(full=True, size=None, style=Style(fg="white", bg="black"))

# Box size = virtual pixels ÷ App.SCALE (10) → "600x140" = 60 cols × 14 rows
box = Box(2, 1, "600x140", border="rounded", style=Style(fg="white", bg="black"), title="Sign Up")

box.add(Label(2, 2, "Username:"))
box.add(Input(12, 2, 20, placeholder="Enter username"))

box.add(Label(2, 4, "Bio:"))
box.add(Input(12, 4, 20, placeholder="Tell us about you", multiline=True))

box.add(Checkbox(2, 7, "Subscribe to newsletter"))
box.add(Checkbox(2, 9, "I agree to the terms", checked=True))

btn = Button(2, 11, "Submit", width=20, style=Style(fg="white", bg="blue"))
btn.on_click(lambda b: print("Submitted!"))
box.add(btn)

app.add(box)
app.focus(btn)
app.on_key(Key.ESC, lambda: "quit")
app.run()

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