I'm in the process of rewriting a server program, and I want to add into it a simple console input.
At the moment, it just serves data and prints out one or two lines for each thing it does, as a descriptive measure for anyone watching/debugging.
What I want is to have a "sticky" input bar that is always at the bottom, above which my debug prints appear, so that I can enter commands at any point while the program is printing. This would look a bit like:
...
[88.88.88.88] Handling Connection on Port 11452
[12.12.12.12] Received Data
[44.44.44.44] Sending Disconnect Sequence
>>>Enter Data Here at Any Time
Ideally, this would be done without curses as this would complicate matters. I feel like I must be missing a simple solution.
Thanks in Advance,
Freddy.
If you're looking for a slightly higher-level library than curses, there are a few, like urwid (although of course they don't come with Python, and have to be installed).
If you really want to avoid a windowing library, I suppose you could run the server under screen, configured with an input bar and a rest-of-the-window, and give the server the two virtual TTYs instead of normal input… but that would be a lot more work, not less.
If you want to go lower level, you can always use termios, search termcap, and manually write control sequences to manually take care of scrolling everything but the last line, moving the input cursor, and so on. But that's going to be even more work.
And of course there's always the super-hacky possibility: For every output, and after every input, "redraw" the whole screen by spamming a few hundred blank lines, re-writing the output, and writing the input line. This will look terrible, and not work in a variety of edge cases, but it does avoid any kind of windowing.
However, I think there's a much better way to solve this problem.
You've already got a server. Why not just serve the console API on another "control" port (maybe just on localhost) instead of on the stdin/stdout/tty? That will work even if the server is, e.g., running as a daemon. And it means you can use your favorite fancy Telnet or similar client as a console, instead of having to write something from scratch.