[ANN] AbsTK – a widget toolkit for GUI and TUI applications

Hi, everyone!

I'm here to announce AbsTK. The Abstract ToolKit is a widget toolkit for GUI and TUI (text-based user interface) applications. It allows you to, with the same source code, build a UI that runs on GUI (GTK) and TUI (Curses). AbsTK is written in Lua and uses lgi and lcurses bindings.

* http://github.com/PedroAlvesV/AbsTK

Install it through LuaRocks:

luarocks install abstk

Documentation: http://github.com/PedroAlvesV/AbsTK/wiki

API Reference: pedroalvesv.github.io/AbsTK

Examples: http://github.com/PedroAlvesV/AbsTK/wiki /Examples

Concepts

The goal of AbsTK is producing wizard-like applications that can run with and without a desktop environment (DE). It's worth it for machines that don't have any DE installed, but also, for instance, installers in which you may prefer a light-weight text-mode (curses) interface, instead of using a GUI.

Although the toolkit focus is on building Wizards, individual Screens can also be produced. Actually, building Screens is the main part of building a Wizard. Wizards are no much more than a group of ordered Screens.

The routine is really minimalistic, but, as stated in the previous paragraph, has two modes. To create a Screen, you initialize it and populate it with widgets. If your UI is a single Screen, just run it. If it's a Wizard, repeat the first process to produce all the Screens. When done, simply create the Wizard, populate it with the Screens and run the Wizard.

Usage

The following example is a minimalistic newsletter subscription form.
It receives the running mode ("gtk" or "curses") as argument as the module is called.
At the end, it stores all submitted info into a Lua table called data.

local abstk = require 'abstk'
abstk.set_mode(...)

local scr = abstk.new_screen("Register Form")

scr:add_label('label', "Fill the fields to register")
scr:add_text_input('email', "E-mail")
scr:add_text_input('user', "Username")
scr:add_password('pswrd', "Password")
scr:add_checkbox('news', "Send me newsletter")

local data = scr:run()

License

Licensed under the terms of the MIT License, the same as Lua.

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Any kind of feedback is strongly encouraged. I hope you enjoy it.

Regards,

Pedro Alves Valentim