Windows Support

[cfangmeier]

It would be nice if there was a nice way to install TUIJam on Windows. Naively I tried doing just a

pip install tuijam

But the dependent version of scrypt failed to compile. I changed to the latest version and that worked. Next, there is a problem with PyGObject which requires, from what I can tell, the GTK+ runtime to be installed for it to work properly. According to the docs installing this involves installing mingw, which I'd really like to avoid. One alternative would be to simply drop the use of PyGObject on windows since it's just used for the external control and on windows maybe a different system that GObject is preferred anyway.

[t1meshift]

AFAIK Windows 10 has native Media Playback API, but I haven't seen any Python bindings for it.
For example, there is a native module for NodeJS for that purpose: https://github.com/NodeRT/NodeRT. GPMDP uses it, seems like it's not that complicated: https://github.com/MarshallOfSound/Google-Play-Music-Desktop-Player-UNOFFICIAL-/blob/master/src/renderer/windows/GPMWebView/playback/systemMediaService/win10.js

The main problem is that is not for Python, so we have to write our own UWP API binding.

[t1meshift]

Also, have found out that python-mpv works with Windows not so smoothly as it does on Unix-like systems, we need to put a workaround on installation process: jaseg/python-mpv#60 (comment)

[longtomjr]

Just a note - to build on windows you will need to install the C++ build tools for pycairo. Dont have a successfull build yet - but will keep you updated

[longtomjr]

I decided to not try going down the mingw route, and to see what it will take to write a wrapper for the windows media playback api in python

[longtomjr]

So from some quick poking around. The ideal would be to build a generator on top of NodeRT's templates to generate Python bindings instead of C# bindings.

The other option is to generate the JS/TS code and see if it is easier to convert it by hand and then maintain it.

Another option:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/python/working-with-c-cpp-python-in-visual-studio?view=vs-2019

With:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/cpp-and-winrt-apis/intro-to-using-cpp-with-winrt

[longtomjr]

Ok, so turning off the media integration - it fails because the loop defined for the uirwid loop is not there.

To make this work in windows, we first have to get urwid working. There is several topics related to it here:

urwid/urwid#240

[cfangmeier]

Hi @longtomjr, Thanks for looking into this. Is there any way to leverage the linux subsystem for windows 10 to get around any of these issues?

[longtomjr]

Ok - so urwid is built heavily using events, sockets and file descriptors. It will take some work to get it working smoothly with windows without implementing a POSIX layer.

[longtomjr]

@cfangmeier I think the WSL should just work with this out of the box - have not tried though. It would make sense to use WSL if you want to - but I would like to see if there is a way to build this for windows and to work in powershell.

I have to use windows at work - and I have a rabid antivirus making even things like git slow, so having the WSL running when there is a antivirus that monitors every file bieng opened etc. would be a bit of a nightmare.

[longtomjr]

I have the feeling that it might be easier and quicker to just rewrite the ui layer in something that is cross platform. Is there any specific reasons urwid was chosen? (Also, is there a irc [or similar] channel it might be easier to discuss this on?)

[cfangmeier]

urwid was chosen because it's a nice wrapper around doing lower level curses programming, and I initially had no plans for making this work on anything other than linux. Do you know of a cross-platform alternative?

I'm not really an IRC user, but am willing to give it a go.

(also, I just noticed that the old style login has broken and I need to update to the new oauth based one, but that's another issue)

[longtomjr]

hehe - yep, saw that too. I cannot vouch for any alternatives (have not used them) but found the folowing:

https://npyscreen.readthedocs.io/introduction.html
https://github.com/pfalcon/picotui
https://github.com/prompt-toolkit/python-prompt-toolkit
https://github.com/jquast/blessed
and python's curses library.

Don't know the cross platform support of any of the above, but they all seem to be maintained to some extent.

[longtomjr]

I made a temp channel on freenode #tuijam.