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What is pyte?

It's an in memory VTXXX-compatible terminal emulator. XXX stands for a series of video terminals, developed by DEC <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation>_ between 1970 and 1995. The first, and probably the most famous one, was VT100 terminal, which is now a de-facto standard for all virtual terminal emulators. pyte follows the suit.

So, why would one need a terminal emulator library?

• To screen scrape terminal apps, for example htop or aptitude.
• To write cross platform terminal emulators; either with a graphical (xterm <http://invisible-island.net/xterm/>, rxvt <http://rxvt.net/>) or a web interface, like AjaxTerm <http://antony.lesuisse.org/software/ajaxterm/>_.
• To have fun, hacking on the ancient, poorly documented technologies.

Note: pyte started as a fork of vt102 <http://github.com/samfoo/vt102>_, which is an incomplete pure Python implementation of VT100 terminal.

Installation

If you have pip <https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable>_ you can do the usual::

pip install pyte

Otherwise, download the source from GitHub <https://github.com/selectel/pyte>_ and run::

python setup.py install

Similar projects

pyte is not alone in the weird world of terminal emulator libraries, here's a few other options worth checking out: Termemulator <http://sourceforge.net/projects/termemulator/>, pyqonsole <http://hg.logilab.org/pyqonsole/>, webtty <http://code.google.com/p/webtty/>, AjaxTerm <http://antony.lesuisse.org/software/ajaxterm/> and of course vt102 <http://github.com/samfoo/vt102>_.