termapp-interaction

A client-server pair to let a process communicate with the user through a Terminal.app window. Works on Python 2.6.

Usage

To try it out, create a Terminal.app window and type:

python termapp_server.py

This will bring up a new window in Terminal.app which appears to be running the Python interpreter. What it is actually running is a client process that is communicating with a Python interpreter object (code.InteractiveConsole) inside termapp_server.py.

Usage within an Indigo plugin

Here's how to hook it up to a menu command. You will need to have termapp_server and termapp_client in the current working directory (which Indigo sets to your Server Plugin directory when it launches the plugin). The resulting Python shell will have access to the namespace in the module you call it from plus the self varable.

from termapp_server import start_shell_thread

# somewhere inside your plugin:

    def startInteractiveInterpreter(self):
        """ Called by the Indigo UI for the Start Interactive Interpreter
        menu item.
        """
        namespace = globals().copy()
        namespace.update(locals())
        start_shell_thread(namespace, "Welcome message", "prompt prefix")

Once you do this you will have a Python shell with access to your plugin's internal data structures and plugin module globals. This is not thread-safe, or any kind of safe.

Or if you want to do some other kind of user interaction, make a function that takes a line of input and returns a boolean, True to use a "..." prompt next and False for a " >>" prompt. When your function is called sys.stdout and sys.stderr will be hooked up to the Terminal.app client, so you can just use print if you want:

from termapp_server import start_interaction_thread

# somewhere inside your plugin:

    def chat(self, line):
        if line:
            print("Hey thanks for telling me " + line)
            return False
        else:
            return True
    
    def startLameChatbot(self):
        """ Called by the Indigo UI for the Start Really Lame Chatbot menu item.
        """
        start_interaction_thread(self.chat, "Welcome message", "prompt prefix")

The threads created are daemon threads so they will not block a plugin from exiting. The start methods return the thread objects created if you want to keep track of them. If the user uses ^D or closes the Terminal window the plugin-side thread will terminate.