Let me note that you can enter these sequences in a Python or Ruby console to immediate test their effect: Figure 3: You can experiment with ANSI sequences in a Python or Ruby consoleĪs you can see, the last byte of these commands always gets represented by a lower-case m. Now, let’s get to work and change the appearance of the displayed text. We’ll take a look at various commands in the following sections! Changing a text’s appearance Now let’s look at the same menu, but this time it’s styled to be a little more convenient to use:Īgain, don’t worry if it all seems overwhelming right now. This will make everything look bloated and even uglier. Therefore, the menu gets printed to the console again when the current task is done. Note how the percentages get printed in a new line.Īnd last but not least, the screen usually doesn’t get cleared when you’ve made a choice. Next, there’s no convenient way to display the progress of an operation that might take a while to finish.
Furthermore, this approach might open up ways for exploits. You’d have to check whether the correct input was made, and repeat your request, if the input was incorrect. First, this requires more input validation. I have several problems with this approach. Usually, a quick and dirty solution might look like this: Figure 2: A classic text-only console application However, many programs need to display a menu of some sort, so that a user can choose from different options. The results then get displayed to the user. Those programs are better off just using input parameters, configuration files, or a one-time input at startup. For example in all such programs, that don’t require the user to continually enter information.
Anyway, let’s take a look at what the main problems are that we’re trying to solve! The problems with a simple text-only console applicationĪs mentioned above, the text-only approach makes sense in many cases. You can also use this technique to develop more advanced console-based applications, like text-editors and spreadsheet programs. But there’s a way to easily style your console applications so that they can have something that you could call a primitive GUI: Figure 1: A simple GUI with a centered main menu and a custom background While I don’t have a problem with a simple text-only menu, it can often scare away new users. That, however, often also means that the user experience can come short. Console applications are a great thing: They usually solely focus on getting things done.
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