The terminal as a platform

This week we’re talking with Will McGugan about using the terminal to not just build software, but also to deliver software. Will is a few months into his journey of building Textualize, a company he started around his open source projects Textual and Rich. When combined Textual and Rich give you a Python framework to build beautiful full-featured TUIs for the Terminal. We talk with Will about his big idea of the terminal as a platform, how he got here from first principles, what it takes to build Textual apps and whether or not they can replace not so good web admins, building, launching, and distributing Textual apps, why Python was his choiice of language, the big picture and business model behind Textualize, and why he’s building this as open source and in public.

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Featuring:

• Will McGugan – Twitter, GitHub
• Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Jerod Santo – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn

Show Notes:

• Textualize.io
• Textualize is Hiring!
• Textualize/textual
• Projects using Textual
• Textualize/rich
• Projects using Rich

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Timestamps:

(00:00) - This week on The Changelog
(01:10) - Sponsor: Square
(02:03) - Start the show!
(02:23) - The Terminal as a Platform
(05:00) - A tool to deliver software
(06:02) - How long have you been working on this?
(06:56) - What's the markup, style, and interaction syntax?
(08:24) - Launching and distributing Terminal applications
(11:21) - Textual apps are very much like web apps
(17:29) - Could this replace not so good web admin views?
(22:47) - Sponsor: FireHydrant
(24:05) - Step 1 of making a TUI with Textual
(28:32) - Distributing a Python app can be hard
(30:55) - Default Python version issues?
(33:03) - Does Textual have routes like a web app?
(38:32) - Textual apps in production now?
(40:09) - To be a user do I need to be a developer?
(46:11) - Sponsor: Sourcegraph
(48:33) - Big picture and business model
(51:49) - Adam is surprised by Will's business model
(53:26) - Two rendering destinations
(54:59) - Why is this model the best business model?
(56:57) - What's the size of this market?
(57:45) - How much web dev do you have to know?
(1:00:44) - Moving from JavaScript to Python
(1:02:49) - Are you hiring?
(1:03:39) - Building in public
(1:06:50) - This is Will's plan b
(1:08:22) - Most excting and most scary part of this plan?
(1:10:12) - Closing out the show
(1:11:18) - Outro