Alot sets up a widget tree and an mainloop in the constructor of alot.ui.UI. The visible area is a urwid.Frame, where the footer is used as a status line and the body part displays the currently active alot.buffers.Buffer.
To be able to bind keystrokes and translate them to Commands, keypresses are not propagated down the widget tree as is customary in urwid. Instead, the root widget given to urwids mainloop is a custom wrapper (alot.ui.Inputwrap) that interprets key presses. A dedicated SendKeypressCommand can be used to trigger key presses to the wrapped root widget and thereby accessing standard urwid behaviour.
In order to keep the interface non-blocking, alot makes use of twisted’s deferred - a framework that makes it easy to deal with callbacks. Many commands in alot make use of inline callbacks, which allow you to treat deferred-returning functions almost like syncronous functions. Consider the following example of a function that prompts for some input and acts on it:
from twisted.internet import defer
@defer.inlineCallbacks
def greet(ui): # ui is instance of alot.ui.UI
name = yield ui.prompt('pls enter your name')
ui.notify('your name is: ' + name)
This class integrates all components of alot and offers methods for user interaction like prompt(), notify() etc. It handles the urwid widget tree and mainloop (we use twisted) and is responsible for opening, closing and focussing buffers.
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applies a command
This calls the pre and post hooks attached to the command, as well as cmd.apply().
Parameters: | cmd (Command) – an applicable command |
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Interprets a command line string and applies the resulting (sequence of) Commands.
Parameters: | cmdline (str) – command line to interpret |
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closes given Buffer.
This it removes it from the bufferlist and calls its cleanup() method.
construct and return statusbar widget
prompt user to make a choice.
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Return type: | twisted.defer.Deferred |
Clears notification popups. Call this to ged rid of messages that don’t time out.
Parameters: | messages – The popups to remove. This should be exactly what notify() returned when creating the popup |
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shuts down user interface without cleaning up. Use a alot.commands.globals.ExitCommand for a clean shutdown.
returns currently open buffers for a given subclass of Buffer.
Parameters: | t (alot.buffers.Buffer) – Buffer class |
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Return type: | list |
return the bottom most focussed widget of the widget tree
opens notification popup.
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Returns: | an urwid widget (this notification) that can be handed to clear_notify() for removal |
prompt for text input. This returns a Deferred that calls back with the input string.
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Return type: | twisted.defer.Deferred |
Replaces root widget by given urwid.Widget and makes the UI ignore all further commands apart from cursor movement. If later on key is pressed, the old root widget is reset, callable afterwards is called and normal behaviour is resumed.
redraw interface
list of active buffers
history of the command line prompt
flag used to prevent multiple ‘index locked’ notifications
stores partial keyboard input
interface mode identifier - type of current buffer
A buffer defines a view to your data. It knows how to render itself, to interpret keypresses and is visible in the “body” part of the widget frame. Different modes are defined by subclasses of the following base class.
Abstract base class for buffers.
called before buffer is closed
return dict of meta infos about this buffer. This can be requested to be displayed in the statusbar.
tells the buffer to (re)construct its visible content.
Available modes are:
Mode | Buffer Subclass |
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search | SearchBuffer |
thread | ThreadBuffer |
bufferlist | BufferlistBuffer |
taglist | TagListBuffer |
envelope | EnvelopeBuffer |
lists all active buffers
message composition mode
toggles visibility of all envelope headers
shows a result list of threads for a query
returns curently focussed alot.widgets.ThreadlineWidget from the result list.
terminates the process that fills this buffers PipeWalker.
displays a thread as a tree of messages
returns all MessageWidgets displayed in this thread-tree.
returns all message widgets contained in this list
returns focussed Message
returns focussed MessageWidget
What follows is a list of the non-standard urwid widgets used in alot. Some of them respect user settings, themes in particular.
Utility Widgets not specific to alot
An AttrMap that can remember attributes to set
This contains alot-specific urwid.Widget used in more than one mode.
one-line summary of an Attachment.
renders a pile of header values as key/value list
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text widget that renders a tagstring.
It looks up the string it displays in the tags section of the config as well as custom theme settings for its tag.
Widgets specific to Bufferlist mode
selectable text widget that represents a Buffer in the BufferlistBuffer.
Widgets specific to search mode
selectable line widget that represents a Thread in the SearchBuffer.
Widgets specific to thread mode
displays printable parts of an email
one line summary of a Message.
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Flow widget that renders a Message.
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get contained email
get contained :class`~alot.db.message.Message`
alot.ui.UI.prompt() allows tab completion using a Completer object handed as ‘completer’ parameter. alot.completion defines several subclasses for different occasions like completing email addresses from an AddressBook, notmuch tagstrings. Some of these actually build on top of each other; the QueryCompleter for example uses a TagsCompleter internally to allow tagstring completion after “is:” or “tag:” keywords when typing a notmuch querystring.
All these classes overide the method complete, which for a given string and cursor position in that string returns a list of tuples (completed_string, new_cursor_position) that are taken to be the completed values. Note that completed_string does not need to have the original string as prefix.
completes a contact from given address books
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completes users’ own mailaddresses
completes option parameters for a given argparse.Parser
Parameters: | parser (argparse.ArgumentParser) – the option parser we look up parameter and choices from |
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completes one command consisting of command name and parameters
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completes command lines: semicolon separated command strings
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computes start and end position of substring of line that is the command string under given position
completes command names
Parameters: | mode (str) – mode identifier |
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base class for completers
returns a list of completions and cursor positions for the string original from position pos on.
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Returns: | pairs of completed string and cursor position in the new string |
Return type: | list of (str, int) |
calculates the subword in a sep-splitted list of substrings of original that pos is ia.n
completes contacts from given address books
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completion for gpg keys
Parameters: | private (bool) – return private keys |
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Meta-Completer that turns any Completer into one that deals with a list of completion strings using the wrapped Completer. This allows for example to easily construct a completer for comma separated recipient-lists using a ContactsCompleter.
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calculates the subword of original that pos is in
completion for paths
completion for a notmuch query string
Parameters: | dbman (DBManager) – used to look up avaliable tagstrings |
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completer for a fixed list of strings
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complete a tagstring
Parameters: | dbman (DBManager) – used to look up avaliable tagstrings |
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completion for a comma separated list of tagstrings
Parameters: | dbman (DBManager) – used to look up avaliable tagstrings |
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