AI and engineering tools - simonwillison.net
The tools on tools.simonwillison.net were mostly built using AI-assisted programming. This page lists 106 tools and their development history.
Technical Blog Post
Summary
A technical deep-dive by Textual's CEO into the algorithms powering high-performance terminal UIs, covering the compositor, rendering pipeline, and how modern UI concepts are adapted to the terminal's limited capabilities.
Highlights
- The compositor combines content from multiple sources into a single view since terminals lack native window overlap support
- The terminal spec provides only basic primitives (cursor movement, colored text, key/mouse input) - everything else is built from scratch
- The painter's algorithm approach is explored for handling overlapping widgets on what appears to be a 2D character grid
- Textual reached its 1.0 milestone, marking a significant point for the framework's maturity
- The framework is inspired by modern web development patterns but adapted for terminal constraints
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Context
Audience
Python developers interested in terminal UIs, systems programmers, and those building command-line applications
DomainTerminal User Interface Development
Formatlong-form technical blog post
Accessfree online
Source Overview
Textual is a TUI framework for Python, inspired by modern web development.
Topics
Related
Textual TUI FrameworkPainter's AlgorithmTerminal Emulationuvx package runnerPython TUI development
