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🛠️ Textual TUI-Creator

Textual TUI-Creator is an interactive, visual WYSIWYG editor and code generator for Textual-based Terminal User Interfaces (TUIs) in Python.

It enables developers and system architects to design complex hierarchical terminal layouts interactively—complete with real-time preview, live property inspector, and direct export into clean, standalone Python source code.

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✨ Features

• 🏗️ Visual Layout Editor: Interactively build hierarchical tree layouts (Vertical, Horizontal, Container).
• 🧩 Extensive Widget Library:
  • Label, Button (Primary, Success, Warning, Error variants)
  • Input (placeholders, password masking)
  • Checkbox, Select dropdown menus
  • ProgressBar, LoadingIndicator
  • Rule (Horizontal dividers), Header, Footer
• ⚡ Real-Time Live Preview: Instantly preview widgets and layout flow directly in the terminal as you design.
• 🔍 Property Inspector: Customize IDs, CSS classes, widget-specific parameters, and event hooks.
• 🐍 Autonomous Python Code Generation: Export standard, production-ready Textual application code (app.py) with zero editor dependencies.
• 💾 Project Persistence & History:
  • Automatic saving and loading of JSON project files located at ~/.local/share/tui-creator/projects/.
  • Full Undo/Redo support (Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y).

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🏛️ Project Architecture

textual-tui-creator/
├── tui_creator.py              # Direct launcher script
├── start_tui_creator.sh        # Shell launcher script
├── run.sh                      # Universal runner (auto-detects virtualenv)
├── setup.sh                    # Automated setup and installer
├── requirements.txt            # Python dependencies
├── README.md                   # English documentation (this file)
├── README_DE.md                # German documentation
├── .gitignore                  # Git ignore rules
│
└── tui_creator/                # Python package
    ├── __init__.py             # Package initializer
    ├── __main__.py             # Package entrypoint
    ├── app.py                  # Textual application instance & routing
    ├── components.py           # Component library and widget descriptors
    ├── generator.py            # Python Textual source code generator
    ├── models.py               # Data models for layout nodes and schema
    ├── storage.py              # JSON project storage and project management
    └── ui.py                   # Editor views, component tree and inspector

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🚀 Installation & Setup

1. Automated Setup (Recommended)

git clone https://github.com/Graba92/textual-tui-creator.git
cd textual-tui-creator
chmod +x setup.sh run.sh
./setup.sh

2. Native Pacman Installation (Arch Linux / CachyOS)

sudo pacman -S --needed python-textual

3. Manual Virtual Environment Setup

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

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🖥️ Usage

Launch the Editor

./run.sh
# or launch with explicit language
python3 tui_creator.py --lang en
python3 tui_creator.py --lang de

⌨️ Keybindings

Shortcut	Action
L	Toggle language between English and Deutsch
Ctrl + S	Save current project
Ctrl + Z	Undo last operation
Ctrl + Y	Redo last operation
Ctrl + E	Export code to .py file
F1	Display help & shortcuts modal
Esc	Return to project home / overview
Tab / Shift+Tab	Cycle focus between tree, preview, and inspector

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📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.