_
              | |
 _ __   _   _ | |_  ___
| '_ \ | | | || __|/ _ \
| |_) || |_| || |_|  __/
| .__/  \__, | \__|\___|
| |      __/ |
|_|     |___/      0.4.3

-- chicks dig dudes with terminals (c) @samfoo

What is pyte?

What is pyte? It’s an in memory VTXXX-compatible terminal emulator. XXX stands for a series video terminals, developed by DEC 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, rxvt) or a web interface, like AjaxTerm.
  • To have fun, hacking on the ancient, poorly documented technologies.

Note: pyte started as a fork of vt102, which is an incomplete pure Python implementation of VT100 terminal.

Installation

If you have setuptools you can use easy_install -U pyte. Otherwise, you can download the source from GitHub 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, pyqonsole, webtty AjaxTerm and of course vt102.

pyte users

Believe it or not, there’re project which actually need a terminal emulator library, not many of them use pyte though:

  • Selectel – hey, we wrote this thing :)
  • Ajenti – easy to use weadmin panel for Linux and BSD uses pyte for its terminal plugin.

Show me the code!

Head over to our brief Tutorial or, if you’re feeling brave, dive right into the API referencepyte also has a couple of minimal examples in the examples/ directory.

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