How to build CLIs using Quo

Learn how you can build CLIs with Quo, a toolkit for writing Command-Line Interface applications.

Quo is a Python based toolkit for writing Command-Line Interface(CLI) applications. Quo is making headway towards composing speedy and orderly CLI applications while forestalling any disappointments brought about by the failure to execute a CLI API.

Quo is easy to learn, and does not come with needless baggage and contains a number of builtin features you can use to create elegant output in your CLI.

Compatibility¶

Quo works flawlessly with Linux, OSX, and Windows. Quo requires Python 3.8 or later.

Features¶

[x] Support for Ansi, RGB and Hex color models
[x] Support for tabular presentation of data
[x] Intuitive progressbars
[x] Code completions
[x] Nesting of commands
[x] Customizable Text User Interface (TUI) dialogs.
[x] Automatic help page generation
[x] Syntax highlighting
[x] Autosuggestions
[x] Key Binders

Getting Started¶

Installation¶

You can install quo via the Python Package Index (PyPI)

pip install -U quo

Run the following to test Quo output on your terminal:

python -m quo

Printing¶

Quo echo¶

To output formatted text to your terminal you can import the echo method. Try this:

Example 1

 from quo import echo

 echo(f"Hello, World!", fg="red", italic=True, bold=True))

Hello World

Example 2

 from quo import echo

 echo("Quo is ", nl=False)
 echo("scalable", bg="red", fg="black")

Scalable

Quo print¶

Alternatively, you can import print

from quo import print

print('<b>This is bold</b>')
print('<i>This is italic</i>')
print('<u>This is underlined</u>')                      
# Colors from the ANSI palette.
print('<red>This is red</red>')
print('<style fg="green" bg="red">Green on red background</stlye>')

Prompts¶

Quo prompt¶

Using quo.prompt method.

from quo import prompt

prompt("What is your name?")

quo.prompt

Using quo.prompt.Prompt object

from quo.prompt import Prompt

session = Prompt()
session.prompt("Type something:")

`Launching Applications`¶

Quo supports launching applications through Console.launch. This can be used to open the default application associated with a URL or filetype.

from quo.console import Console

console = Console()
console.launch("https://quo.rtfd.io/")

Completions¶

Autocompletion¶

Press [Tab] to autocomplete

from quo.prompt import Prompt
from quo.completion import WordCompleter
example = WordCompleter(['USA', 'UK', 'Canada', 'Kenya'])
session = Prompt(completer=example)
session.prompt('Which country are you from?: ')

Autocompletion

Autosuggestion¶

Auto suggestion is a way to propose some input completions to the user. Usually, the input is compared to the history and when there is another entry starting with the given text, the completion will be shown as gray text behind the current input. Pressing the right arrow → or ctrl-e will insert this suggestion, alt-f willinsert the first word of the suggestion.

from quo.history import MemoryHistory
from quo.prompt import Prompt

MemoryHistory.append("import os")
MemoryHistory.append('print("hello")') 
MemoryHistory.append('print("world")')  
MemoryHistory.append("import path")

session = Prompt(history=MemoryHistory, suggest="history")

while True:
   session.prompt('> ')

Documenting Scripts¶

Quo automatically generates help pages for your command-line tools.

from quo import print
from quo.console import command
from quo.console import app

@command()
@app('--count', default=1, help='number of greetings')
@app('--name', prompt="What is your name?", help="The person to greet")

def hello(count: int, name: str):
    """This script prints hello NAME COUNT times."""
       for x in range(count):
           print(f"Hello {name}!")

if __name__ == "__main__":
          hello()

And what it looks like after executing:

python example.py --help

Help Text

Progress¶

Creating a new progress bar can be done by calling the class ProgressBar The progress can be displayed for any iterable. This works by wrapping the iterable (like range) with the class ProgressBar

import time
from quo.progress import ProgressBar

with ProgressBar() as pb:
              for i in pb(range(800)):
                            time.sleep(.01)

Progress

Key Binding¶

A key binding is an association between a physical key on a keyboard and a parameter.

from quo import echo
from quo.keys import bind
from quo.prompt import Prompt

session = Prompt() 
# Print "Hello world" when ctrl-h is pressed
@bind.add("ctrl-h")
def _(event):
    echo("Hello, World!")
session.prompt(">> ")

Dialogs¶

This is a high level API for displaying dialog boxes to the user for informational purposes, or get input from the user.

1) Example of a message box dialog.

from quo.dialog import MessageBox

MessageBox(
        title="Message pop up window",
        text="Do you want to continue?\nPress ENTER to quit.")

The above code produces the following output Message Box

2) Example of a prompt box dialog

from quo.dialog import InputBox

InputBox(
          title="InputBox shenanigans",
          text="What Country are you from?:")

Prompt Box

Tables¶

Function Table offers a number of configuration options to set the look and feel of the table, including how borders are rendered and the style and alignment of the columns.

Example

from quo.table import Table

data = [
  ["Name", "Gender", "Age"],
  ["Alice", "F", 24],
  ["Bob", "M", 19],
  ["Dave", "M", 24]
]

Table(data)

tabulate

Widgets¶

A collection of reusable components for building full screen applications.

Label¶

Widget that displays the given text. It is not editable or focusable.

from quo import container
from quo.widget import Label

content = Label("Hello, World", style="fg:black bg:red")

# Press `ctrl-c` to exit
container(content, bind=True, full_screen=True)