clanimtk - Command Line Animation Toolkit

The scrolling_text animation can be found in the clanim package, which contains some examples of how one can use clanimtk.

Overview

clanimtk (Command Line Animation Toolkit) is a toolkit for quickly creating custom command line animations. It is most suitable for long-running tasks that are primarily I/O bound, as the animations themselves will require some CPU time. It is strongly recommended to have a look at the brief introduction in the Docs before using clanimtk. If you just want to dive right in without reading any documentation, here is a minimal example.

import time
from clanimtk import animation, animate

@animation
def hashes():
    return (("#" * i).ljust(4) for i in range(5))


@animate(animation=hashes()) # note that the Animation is called to produce an AnimationGenerator
def sleep(duration):
    time.sleep(duration)
    return 42

which results in the folowing animation:

The whole thing is explained in detail in the Docs.

Requirements

clanimtk is pure Python, so all you need is Python 3.6 or higher and a terminal emulator that supports ANSI escape sequences (which most terminal emulators do!).

Install

Option 1: Install release version from PyPi with pip

The latest release of clanimtk is on PyPi, and can thus be installed as with pip install clanimtk (with your own preferred options, of course).

Option 2: Clone the repo and the install with pip

If you want the dev version, you will need to clone the repo, as only release versions are uploaded to PyPi. Unless you are planning to work on this yourself, I suggest going with the release version.

1. Clone the repo with git:
   • git clone https://github.com/slarse/clanimtk
2. cd into the project root directory and install with pip.
   • pip install --user ., this will create a local install for the current user.
   • Or just pip install . if you use virtualenv.
   • For development, use pip install -e . in a virtualenv.

License

This software is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for specifics.

Contributing

I gladly accept contributions if they are in line with my vision for the toolkit (which is hard to put into words). If you have an idea that you want to discuss with me, don't hesitate to contact me! Most welcome additions are tests, documentation as well as overall improvements to the core animation loop (which is currently threaded and not particularly efficient).