articles/2022/10/29/til-textual-fb-term/

[utterances-bot]

TIL: running Textual on a framebuffer terminal emulator for Linux | bylr.info

My successful (yet probably vain) attempt at running Textual (a modern TUI framework) on a Raspberry Pi without X11 by using fbpad (a framebuffer terminal emulator for Linux).

https://bylr.info/articles/2022/10/29/til-textual-fb-term/

[TheOnlyWayUp]

Great stuff!

[burbma]

Thanks for the write up! Could you provide more instructions on how you go about your very last comment?

I’ll likely move on to a bare-bone X11 setup without windows manager nor Desktop environment (basically startx + fullscreen xterm), since it addresses most of these limitations.

[abey79]

@burbma As it turns out, I haven't gotten around to that part yet. I'm not super expert at this stuff either, tbh. What I would do is to look for a very minimalistic X11 windows manager, and use it to launch xterm in fullscreen at boot. I'd actually need to do some research for the specifics. The idea would mainly be to avoid full-blown desktop environment like KDE/gnome/etc.

[burbma]

For my case I think I'll be able to sudo apt install xinit xterm and then utilize auto login and have my .bashrc check for $DISPLAY being set, if not have it run startx and if so then startx has been ran and $TERM should now be xterm so my .bashrc can check $TERM and if it's xterm have it launch my Textual program. I think I should be able to utilize .Xresources to set the font size and font to one I have put in /usr/share/fonts/truetype/<my-font>.ttf (and then ran fc-cache -f -v). I haven't done all these steps yet but so far it looks promising.

[burbma]

Edit: add fontconfig to the list of sudo apt install. And obviously whatever you're using to manage your python env and dependencies etc.

[burbma]

I had to also install x11-xserver-utils and then here's my ~/.Xresources:

xterm*faceName: Space Mono
xterm*faceSize: 14
xterm*renderFont: true
xterm*maximized: true

! Dracula Xresources palette
*.foreground: #F8F8F2
*.background: #282A36
*.color0:     #000000
*.color8:     #4D4D4D
*.color1:     #FF5555
*.color9:     #FF6E67
*.color2:     #50FA7B
*.color10:    #5AF78E
*.color3:     #F1FA8C
*.color11:    #F4F99D
*.color4:     #BD93F9
*.color12:    #CAA9FA
*.color5:     #FF79C6
*.color13:    #FF92D0
*.color6:     #8BE9FD
*.color14:    #9AEDFE
*.color7:     #BFBFBF
*.color15:    #E6E6E6

and also I needed ~/.xinitrc like so

#!/bin/sh
[[ -f ~/.Xresources ]] && xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources
. /etc/X11/Xsession

Anyways, this isn't a full tutorial but hopefully there's enough hints here to get any interested readers going in the future.

[abey79]

Awesome @burbma, thanks for sharing!