Looped Network

I had written not very long ago about my progress on my little Write Freely python client that I've been working on to facilitate my ability to create posts from an SSH session to a VPS. I actually had a bit of an “Oh no!” moment just the other day when I realized that I might be able to accomplish what I'm looking to do just by going to the write.as website from a TUI browser like w3m, but a quick test let me know that Javascript was required.

This weekend I felt like I didn't have a ton left to work out from the perspective of the CLI version of the application, at least for a first build. I wanted to round out some of the functionality with pulling back post information to then be able to get IDs for deleting posts. Based on that, then I needed to update some of the help documentation. With that implemented, though, I wanted to test it from my VPS. Out of the gate, that was a bit of a pain since I'm not feeling like things are ready to push to something like PyPI yet. So instead, I just cloned my repo, manually created the virtual environment, installed the dependencies, and then created a shell script in my $PATH named writepyly that just contained:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
/home/{username}/code/writepyly/.venv/bin/python /home/{username}/code/writepyly/src/__main__.py $@

In this case, {username} holds my actual username on the system. This works great and allowed me to put some of the functionality through its paces. I got to fix a few bugs with things like trying to push posts when I didn't have any configuration files, for example. I apparently like to catch errors and then not actually stop the execution flow. This post, however, is being made from the my client on the VPS.

After getting the VPS side of things sorted, I went back to start building out the TUI version of the application, which I want to launch when writepyly is executed without any commands provided. In the original branch, that would simply print the help documentation. In this new version, only writepyly help will trigger that while writepyly by itself will cause the TUI to load up.

This will be an interesting learning experience for me since I have zero experience building something like this. I'm using rich as the framework for the TUI, and it honestly seems very easy to work with. I think building out everything except for creating new posts will be super easy. Creating new posts is going to involve basically having a text editor in my application, so I currently have no idea what the hell that will look like. Maybe instead of having a text editor for post creation, I'll just initiate prompt the user from the TUI for where the file they want to use is. I don't see a ton of value in trying to recreate something like Vim, Emacs, Micro, etc. given that they'll all be better solutions for writing content than what I would put together. 🤔