Terminal History

A somewhat cleaner solution to the problem of printing on the same line as input. This solution works by moving the cursor after the terminal echoes the newline, but to do so it needs to know the length of the terminal's last line, which is why it needs to record every line written.

Public Interface

Classes

• TempHistory - class for recording the latest line from the terminal (if you use its methods)
• TerminalHistory - subclass of TempHistory for recording all lines from the terminal

Methods

• print(*values, sep=" ", end="\n", file=sys.stdout, flush=False, record=True

• behaves the same as the built-in print function, except it also records what's printed if record is True

• input(prompt="", record=True, newline=True) - behaves the same as the built-in input function, except it also records the prompt and input, as well as stripping the newline if newline is False

Attributes

• For TempHistory, line - the current available line for echoing
• For TerminalHistory, lines - a list of all lines echoed to the terminal via the print and input methods

Functions

• enable_print_after_input - convenience function to override the built-in print and input functions with ones that record output, enabling printing after getting input (as the name suggests)

Example Usage

import terminalhistory  # What's the convention for naming these anyway?

enable_print_after_input()

print("Line one. ", end="")
input("Also on line one, right? ", newline=False)
print(". This is also on line one.")

Output (with "yeah" as input):

Line one. Also on line one, right? yeah. Also on line one.

To do

• Implement write method that replaces sys.stdout.write and sys.stderr.write, behaving almost the same except with the additional recording functionality
• Implement read, readline and readlines methods that replace sys.stdin.read, sys.stdin.readline and sys.stdin.readlines respectively, with recording functionality as well
• Handle long strings when the prompt has escape sequences (due to the built-in input method, weird wrapping issues occur if you use escape sequences in the prompt or print(prompt, end=""))