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General description of project

E.g. Building an inventory tracking system for my CCA

A terminal multiplexer for UNIX systems, (in OOP, of course). Allows a user to interact with multiple terminal sessions with ease through a single terminal window. Users can utilise keybindings to conveniently jump between terminal sessions, allowing for better productivity.

Why UNIX?

From my googling i noticed there isn't any official pty/tty support for DOS from the python folks, and while external libraries do exist, i want to build this from scratch as much as possible. However I still plan on using the curses module (ported version of GNU ncurses) because I feel that writing my own TUI implementation would not only be gruesomely painful, but also take precious time away from the main focus of the project.

Goals of project

E.g. Streamline tracking and cataloguing of inventory to facilitate member loans, repairs & Semester stock-taking needs

Streamline working in the terminal by making managing multiple terminal sessions more feasable and productive, just to make the lives of the DevOps folks and everyday programmers a little less painful. No one likes having to repeatedly Alt-Tab between 2 terminal windows (or just windows in general). Literally no one.

Listing of features

List all the features in the fully functional app - you may choose to work on a subset of this listing to produce a MVP (minimum viable product) given constraint of time

External Scanning

Are there similar apps / codebase that you found online that is similar to your project? Provide link(s) to these projects and outline how will your project be different?

tmux - The main inspiration for this project. Built with C in 2007, it lacks OOP structure simply due to the limitations of C. My project plans to extend certain features of tmux (refer above).

pytmux - Tmux clone in python. It's a simple POC, only 1 main file (1000 lines!) which lacks coherent structure. Although using OOP, it doesn't include 99% of the core features of tmux. Just one emulated terminal window and that's it.

pymux - Another tmux clone in python. Blazingly slow (its python so whatever), relies on heavy imports from external libraries. Also discontinued 2 years ago, so its basically legacy code at this point.

Listing of Key Use Cases

Yearly, CCA senior will do stock-take and will need to generate a report on the existing stock. Start of school break, members will loan equipment and will need to return when school break ends.

Using the terminal is a basic skill for any developer entering the workforce. A sizeable (although minority) portion of developers also use terminal-based editors (e.g. vim, emacs).

  • Switiching between terminal windows with ease boosts productivity significantly.

  • Allows you to monitor a background process (e.g. system logs) while working on other stuff

Skills that my project requires me to pick up

List out the skills that you are not familiar with that is necessary due to the project scope.

  • curses
  • ANSI escape codes
  • Unicode
  • Terminal interaction (signals, etc.)
  • Logging
  • Configurations
  • ttys and ptys