How To Accept User Input?

[TheCedarPrince]

Hi @FedeClaudi !

How do I use Term.jl to accept user input?
For example, I have the following render:

and would somehow like to use prompt within it.
When I tried using prompt inside of a Panel, I get this:

How do I accept user input within the box?
Any thoughts?
Thank you!

[FedeClaudi]

Hi,

Currently you can't unfortunately, I haven't tackled inputs yet.

[johnnychen94]

I believe the missing key component here is a new Panel-like object with generic IO support. Our GSoC project would also require this when trying to assembled REPL with Term.jl https://github.com/soumitradev/TermLayouts.jl

cc: @soumitradev

[TheCedarPrince]

Ah thanks @FedeClaudi and @johnnychen94 .
I was wondering if this was possible.
Seems a tricky problem as I could see two ways of approaching it:

1. Give a new Panel object that is wrapped around prompt a fixed amount of space for typing into.
2. Redraw the box (i.e. buffer) around someone's input each time they input a character into this new PanelInput object or something like that.

I could see it being quite challenging!
I see that rich does support a form of it here: https://rich.readthedocs.io/en/latest/_modules/rich/console.html#Console.input

[FedeClaudi]

Hey, I've converted this to a discussion since we're throwing ideas around and I won't get to implementing them any time soon.

I see two challenges:

1. I'd need to look into how prompt works, but likely we'd have to use ANSI commands to place the cursor location "inside" a panel instead of at the end of the last line
2. The panel should re-size automatically as the size of the input changes.

For (2), I haven't implemented this kind of "live" updatable renderables yet. It likely would just be a panel wrapped into something that refreshes the display at, say, 60 Hz. A bit expensive to create a new panel at each refresh but it might be ok performance wise.

---

Rich does have Prompt classes but they don't wrap it around a Panel. They just add some style and some pre-defined prompt texts. That would be much easier to do.

[FedeClaudi]

Just an update to say that v2.0 will include a Prompt renderable for getting user input: #175

[TheCedarPrince]

Amazing! I was thinking about Term.jl recently and am excited to see about bringing it into my tools! 😄