ANN – The textual-cogs Package – Creating Reusable Dialogs for Textual

Textual-cogs is a collection of Textual dialogs that you can use in your Textual application. You can see a quick demo of the dialogs below:

Dialogs included so far:

• Generic MessageDialog – shows messages to the user
• SaveFileDialog – gives the user a way to select a location to save a file
• SingleChoiceDialog – gives the user a series of choices to pick from
• TextEntryDialog – ask the user a question and get their answer using an Input widget
• and more

You can check out textual-cogs on GitHub.

You can install textual-cog using pip:

python -m pip install textual-cog

You also need Textual to run these dialogs.

Here is an example of creating a small application that opens the MessageDialog immediately. You would normally open the dialog in response to a message or event that has occurred, such as when the application has an error or you need to tell the user something.

from textual.app import App
from textual.app import App, ComposeResult

from textual_cogs.dialogs import MessageDialog
from textual_cogs import icons


class DialogApp(App):
    def on_mount(self) -> ComposeResult:
        def my_callback(value: None | bool) -> None:
            self.exit()

        self.push_screen(
            MessageDialog(
                "What is your favorite language?",
                icon=icons.ICON_QUESTION,
                title="Warning",
            ),
            my_callback,
        )


if __name__ == "__main__":
    app = DialogApp()
    app.run()

When you run this code, you will get something like the following:

 

The following code demonstrates how to create a SaveFileDialog:

from textual.app import App
from textual.app import App, ComposeResult

from textual_cogs.dialogs import SaveFileDialog


class DialogApp(App):
    def on_mount(self) -> ComposeResult:        
        self.push_screen(SaveFileDialog())

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app = DialogApp()
    app.run()

When you run this code, you will see the following:

Wrapping Up

The textual-cogs package is currently only a collection of reusable dialogs for your Textual application. However, this can help speed up your ability to add code to your TUI applications because the dialogs are taken care of for you.

Check it out on GitHub or the Python Package Index today.