qtpyTerminal

A Vt100 terminal widget for qtpy (PyQt, Pyside)

About

qtpyTerminal is a QWidget derived from QPlainTextEdit, which can execute an interactive command to run in the default shell (SHELL environment variable). The shell process is forked, and input/output is redirected to the Qt widget. It is then possible to interact with the program, as in a VT100 terminal thanks to the use of Pyte for escape codes interpretation (see https://github.com/selectel/pyte).

qtpyTerminal-2024-09-13_13.25.32.mp4

Installation

qtpyTerminal only requires pyte and qtpy - it should run seamlessly with different Python Qt backends like PyQt or Pyside.

Clone the repository, and from the source directory:

pip install .

(to have it installed in the current Python environment).

Example

import sys
from qtpy import QtGui, QtWidgets
from qtpyTerminal import qtpyTerminal

# Create the Qt application and console.
app = QtWidgets.QApplication([])
mainwin = QtWidgets.QMainWindow()
mainwin.setWindowTitle("qtpyTerminal example")
container = QtWidgets.QWidget(mainwin)
container.setLayout(QtWidgets.QVBoxLayout())
mainwin.setCentralWidget(container)

console = qtpyTerminal(mainwin)

def exit():
  console.stop()
  app.quit()

start_button = QtWidgets.QPushButton("Start shell", container)
start_button.clicked.connect(console.start)
container.layout().addWidget(start_button)
container.layout().addWidget(console)
quit_button = QtWidgets.QPushButton("Quit", container)
quit_button.clicked.connect(exit)
container.layout().addWidget(quit_button)

# Show widget and launch Qt's event loop.
mainwin.show()
sys.exit(app.exec_())

By default the process started by the terminal is defined by the SHELL environment variable. It is possible to call .set_cmd() to launch another command - for example .set_cmd("python") will start an interactive session of the Python interpreter in the Terminal widget.

The widget size policy is MinimumExpanding on both directions. Vertical scrolling is handled. Please note that horizontal scrolling is not implemented yet. So, it is better to define a fixed number of columns. By default the terminal is 132 columns.

The number of columns or default number of rows can be defined with .set_cols() or .set_rows(). It is also possible to give them directly as arguments of qtpyTerminal constructor.

By default, the widgets uses "text" color (QPalette) for the main foreground color, and "base" color for the background. It can be changed by calling set_fgcolor(QColor) or set_bgcolor(QColor) respectively.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Please submit merge requests.