Jekyll2023-12-10T15:28:59+00:00http://thymus.dev/feed.xmlThe Thymus project's blog2023-12-10T00:00:00+00:002023-12-10T00:00:00+00:00http://thymus.dev/Release-0-1-7<p>Hurray! The first winter release! Also, it is the last release in the waning 2023 (except for any possible hotfixes).</p> <h2 id="library-updates">Library updates</h2> <p>Textual is updated to 0.44.1. They promise some noticeable performance changes! So, I advise everyone to update.</p> <p>Netmiko and some of its dependencies have gone. Thymus requires AsyncSSH with bcrypt and telnetlib3 now. More below.</p> <p>Thymus requires Thymus AST at least 0.1.6 version. More below.</p> <p>Lots of other libs are updated to the latest versions.</p> <h2 id="thymus-ast-and-ios-improvements">Thymus AST and IOS improvements</h2> <p>I updated Thymus-AST to the version 0.1.6. This version includes three enhancements. Let’s start with the smallest one. Thymus supports at least two versions of UTF-8 encoded files: plain UTF-8 and UTF-8 with BOM. The latter uses a special symbol at the beginning of files <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">\ufeff</code>. When Thymus opens any config as a BOM-encoded file, the standard library (its open call) automatically strips the symbol, and everything is fine. When the same file is opened as a plain UTF-encoded, the symbol persists there. In general, it does not pose any problem, but sometimes, especially for IOS-likes platforms, a config can begin with a comment line. In this case, Thymus starts considering the comment line as a normal config statement, which is not the way I’ve ever planned. So, I made some safeguard code that checks every line for the BOM symbol and strips it.</p> <p>What’s next? I’ve noticed that in some cases IOS can add meaningless lines at the beginning of a file. For example, there can be “Building configuration…” or “Current configuration…” lines. Before this release, Thymus AST parsed them as stub elements of a root node. That wasn’t good at all. To solve this I decided to ignore all lines, preceding the “version” keyword, which is a part of every IOS-like config. Now, if a config does not contain the “version” somewhere in the beginning, it won’t be parsed.</p> <p>And it creates an issue for Arista’s EOS. It looks like they don’t add “version” in config files. I didn’t want to create a new settings key (like promiscuous mode) for EOS, so I intentionally made some hack that inserts a fake “version” line before parsing and changes it with “!” after. I think that EOS doesn’t like to add some extra lines to a config header without the “!”, that’s why I decided to produce this workaround and monitor the situation. Maybe later I will have to change the logic again.</p> <p>Last but not least. IOS-like platforms have a special type of stub statement: a multiline one. This statement contains two encounters of a special boundary symbol <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">^C</code>. Between its encounters, all lines belong to the same stub statement. One can already guess Thymus AST considered such lines as standalone stubs. Let me give you an example.</p> <p><img src="/images/thymus-multiline-stub-issue.png" alt="Multiline_stub" /></p> <p>In the picture, a number at the beginning of each line depicts an index of a stub. I had to deal with this issue and alter parsing accordingly. Now, Thymus AST accumulates lines between two <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">^C</code> and corresponds them to the first line where the first <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">^C</code> of a pair lives. Anyway, when you use the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">show</code> command in Thymus, it shows you these lines separately, just like in a configuration, but any sub-commands (e.g., <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">show | stubs | include </code>) yield all these lines together now.</p> <p><img src="/images/thymus-multiline-stub-fixed.png" alt="Fixed_multiline_stub" /></p> <h2 id="farewell-netmiko">Farewell Netmiko!</h2> <p>Finally, I found some energy to deal with my network loader module! Previously, I’ve told why Netmiko was not so good choice for my application. I’ve never meant that Netmiko is bad or something! This is an amazing tool, but I wanted something more lightweight, and I’ve made it! It is async-full and requires no threading. The original network loader was a wrapper around Netmiko, and I used a thread to work it concurrently with Thymus. Because of async now I can skip coping with threading on my own and leave it to Textual, which does it way better under the hood.</p> <p>Netmiko dragged some useless (in my case) libraries. All of them were thrown away. To support my current code Thymus requires AsyncSSH and telnetlib3 libraries. The former also can be united with the bcrypt library which allows decrypting local SSH keys.</p> <p>Speaking about SSH keys. In release 0.1.6 one can use SSH keys only when they were stored in a local SSH agent. An alternative option was password-based authentication. From 0.1.7 it is possible to use local-stored SSH keys that aren’t included in the SSH agent. A user does not have to specify a path to a key explicitly, Thymus searches for all possible keys automatically. Two options can be selected by a new control next to the selection between Telnet and SSH. For the password mode, Thymus still tries to connect to a local SSH agent and retrieve keys, but if it fails it will use a user and password pair. Otherwise, for the key-searching mode, it again tries the agent, but as a fallback, it searches inside <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">~/.ssh</code> and <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">~/ssh</code> folders for any keys whose names start with <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">id_</code> and contain key type (rsa, ecdsa, etc.). For this mode, the field of password becomes the passphrase field to decrypt the key. AsyncSSH tries the strongest algorithms first. It will use the passphrase with each key starting from the strongest ones.</p> <p>The code of the current network module is based on the general attitude and logic of the Netdev project (http://netdev.readthedocs.io/). Netdev is written by Sergey Yakovlev (selfuryon at gmail.com). Sergey has ceased the support of Netdev. The code from Netdev wasn’t copied as is and the Thymus module was written from scratch with an eye on the Netdev code, but I think it is important to thank Sergey for his outstanding work. Many platforms, parts of the Netdev code, and so on were skipped here because for now, I consider them redundant for my little goals. The main goal of this code is to allow Thymus to fetch config from a remote node. All other interaction with the node is out of scope. I also added Telnet support from scratch.</p> <p>To be honest, I expect some issues with my code, but I’m glad I’ve stepped this way.</p> <h2 id="minor-fixes">Minor fixes</h2> <p>Arista EOS hasn’t been tested well because I expected that it was all the same as for IOS. I’ve stumbled upon the broken <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">set</code> command with some keys (e.g., base heuristics). I think it is time for unit tests because I’m tired of going in a circle of the same problems.</p> <p>Because of recent changes in the settings module the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">global show</code> gave default settings in every case.</p> <p>I’ve also improved the stability of Thymus and made some refactoring, but it will be too boring to read about the details.</p> <p>And screenshots! Yes, they are fixed now!</p> <p>Stay <del>tuna</del>tuned!</p>

Hurray! The first winter release! Also, it is the last release in the waning 2023 (except for any possible hotfixes).

2023-11-24T00:00:00+00:002023-11-24T00:00:00+00:00http://thymus.dev/Release-0-1-6<p>The third autumn release has silently come out! There are not so many changes out of there, but I finally fixed a very annoying trouble.</p> <h2 id="library-updates">Library updates</h2> <p>Textual is updated to 0.41.0. Nothing special, just a regular update.</p> <p>Lots of other libs are updated to the latest versions too.</p> <h2 id="thymus-ast-and-junos-navigation">Thymus AST and JunOS navigation</h2> <p>I’ve decided to review my previous approach to fix the problem with the JunOS navigation through inactive sections. Yes, it didn’t work until now. The core of the problem belonged not to Thymus but to Thymus-AST. The former is just a drawing tool, while the latter is in charge of constructing and navigating trees. I separated an inactive keyword from the name of a branch. So, if a config has an inactive section, this keyword won’t be a part of a corresponding branch’s name. Any branch already has a dedicated property for that, stripping a keyword from a name eases navigation without losing the property itself. At the same time, the config’s body is not changed, and users see it as is. Frankly speaking, I’ve lost some time dealing with the alignment of some parsing functions to the new approach, but it’s done now (I hope, forever).</p> <p>Additionally, I’ve brought support for yet another section’s property – protected. It can be used alone via the “protect:” keyword in the configuration or can be added to the inactive property. Now, Thymus supports navigation through such sections.</p> <h2 id="folders-mess">Folders mess</h2> <p>I’ve been ignoring some loose ends for a while, and Thymus could create a mess by its folders. It created them here and there, depending on a relative path during every execution. Finally, I’ve tied all of this. All folders are united under a “thymus_data” umbrella which resides in a user’s home.</p> <h2 id="default-path">Default path</h2> <p>The focus on user experience is pivotal and I continue polishing the usability. The Directory tree element of the Open Dialog loads the content of a predefined path now. This path can be set via the configuration file or CLI. By default, it is “~/thymus_data/saves”. If you have some path, that contains most of your configs or folders with them, you’d probably prefer Thymus to open it immediately, saving some clicks.</p> <h2 id="requirementstxt">requirements.txt</h2> <p>Some time ago I stumbled upon some texts that blame the requirements.txt file. Thymus can be installed via the PIP tool from day one thanks to the Poetry backend. I know, some folks are more in a classical approach, that’s why I was holding this file alive. But now I’ve decided to get rid of this complexity and deleted it.</p> <h2 id="known-issues">Known issues</h2> <p>I’ve completely broken the screenshots feature, it’ll be fixed in the upcoming release!</p> <p>Thymus doesn’t support SSH keys yet. The reason is that the support of the keys by Netmiko is not the same as the support by Paramiko. I don’t know why, but Netmiko requires a key to be explicitly specified. Paramiko can work this way too, but it can also search for many possible keys automatically. I’ve offered the Netmiko devs to add this behavior too, but it looks like I haven’t been convincing. So, yet another reason to proceed without Netmiko further.</p> <p>Stay <del>tuna</del>tuned!</p>

The third autumn release has silently come out! There are not so many changes out of there, but I finally fixed a very annoying trouble.

2023-10-22T00:00:00+00:002023-10-22T00:00:00+00:00http://thymus.dev/Release-0-1-5<p>The second autumn release is here!</p> <h2 id="library-updates">Library updates</h2> <p>Textual is updated to 0.40.0. Although it brings TextArea support, Thymus does not currently use it. The reasons behind this are covered below.</p> <p>Lots of other libs are updated to the latest versions too.</p> <h2 id="thymus-ast">Thymus AST</h2> <p>I moved out all things that parse config files and build syntax trees to a separate project. Now, one can install it from the PIP registry directly. I just needed this stuff in other projects and copying, pasting, and modifying it from many places is not as convenient as I want. Moreover, maybe someone also needs this functionality apart from Thymus. Now, that it is possible.</p> <h2 id="history">History</h2> <p>All unique commands that users input are saved now to allow them to navigate through the list and repeat any command without typing it again. The list is limited to 30 commands but I have plans to make this limit configurable. There are hotkeys for the navigation up and down through the list: Crtl+Up and Ctrl+Down.</p> <h2 id="up-show">Up show</h2> <p>One day I decided to make the “up” command combinable with “show” just like the “top” one. But for that moment the “show” part didn’t support relative paths and any sub-commands. Now it all is possible.</p> <h2 id="platforms-switch">Platforms switch</h2> <p>When users open files, there are several UI elements that can influence the working contexts of these opening files. One of them is the Platforms switch which gives users the option to specify a platform type. The position of this switch was preserved during every appearance of the Open dialog but was lost after Thymus was closed. Based on the idea that users can work with a single platform during some project or maybe all the time, I decided to preserve the position of this switch saving it automatically in the main configuration file of Thymus.</p> <h2 id="what-about-the-textarea">What about the TextArea?</h2> <p>Despite that guys finally added this feature to the Textual lib it does not have a minimum set of features I need to ship you all that I want. I understood that lots of stuff I had to do on my own but some of the things were too expensive from the time point of view so I decided to wait for them from the original authors.</p> <p>Stay <del>tuna</del>tuned!</p>

The second autumn release is here!

2023-09-12T00:00:00+00:002023-09-12T00:00:00+00:00http://thymus.dev/Release-0-1-4<p>Release 0.1.4 alpha has just been pushed. No more annoying symbols (at least for now)!</p> <p>All the important information can be found in the previous <del>series</del> posts. This is just an announcement.</p> <p>Stay <del>tuna</del>tuned!</p>

Release 0.1.4 alpha has just been pushed. No more annoying symbols (at least for now)!

2023-09-09T00:00:00+00:002023-09-09T00:00:00+00:00http://thymus.dev/Experimental-0-1-3-f1-e5<p>This time there are some noticeable changes were made. This experimental release is going to be the last one before the upcoming stable. The stable release will be based on this experimental without significant changes bringing better user experience and overall stability.</p> <h2 id="library-updates">Library updates</h2> <p>Textual is updated to <strong>0.36.0</strong>. This build brings nothing new, it’s just a matter of being up to date.</p> <p><em>For every new experimental release pay attention to the requirements.txt file!</em></p> <h2 id="keyboard-navigation-cont">Keyboard navigation (cont.)</h2> <p>Previously, after you opened a file, the Open dialog was immediately hidden in the background and its next appearance had the focus on the same place where you had left it. With a keyboard navigation that means that the focus points on the Input field at the very bottom, where a filename lives. A mouse user probably opens a file with a dedicated button and won’t face any issues. But for a keyboard-addicted user, when the Open dialog pops up again and its focus points to any input field, it breaks most of the hotkeys (especially, the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">p</code>, <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">e</code>, and <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">t</code>). To prevent this issue the focus moves now a step back to the Directory tree field after the Open dialog disappears.</p> <p>At the Working screen, the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">Tab</code> key now appends a space after every completed keyword, it should save you some time and key-strokes. It does not work every time but only when the auto-completion system is sure that it won’t break anything.</p> <p>The sweetest addition. After you finish typing a keyword or the auto-completion system does it for you, the Left sidebar will show you all the next possible sections. From now you can finally discover what’s next to type in. Frankly speaking, I was planning it from the very beginning and even made it at first. But the previous version of it was not satisfying and I got rid of it. It’s time for Lannister to pay his debt.</p> <h2 id="context-switching">Context switching</h2> <p>The modal dialog for context switching shows a context name next to its platform type now instead of a path if the name is set by a user. It should facilitate navigation among different contexts.</p> <p><img src="/images/thymus_context_switch_dialog_upd.png" alt="context_switching_upd" /></p> <h2 id="fixes">Fixes</h2> <p>As usual, some fixes were made. They are too difficult to explain here, but most of them are linked to a revised navigation explained above. Some chores should have been done a long time ago, and now they are.</p> <h2 id="plans">Plans</h2> <p>In parallel, I’m working on a config analyzing system which should ease some common network engineering tasks, such as planning, migration, config inspection. This job is long-term, but some preliminary results will be available in upcoming experimental releases. I’ve started with JunOS (again), because I have deeper understanding of this system comparing to the other systems.</p> <p>Another concern I have is a network scraping library. At the moment, Thymus leans on Netmiko. I decided to use it because of its battle-proveness and continuous support. Netmiko is a great tool that works well on many platforms, including Windows. But its powerfulness raises some side-effects. There are too many features and dependencies in it for such a small task that Thymus completes. I’d love to find something more lightweight for that. The second concern is that Netmiko is an async-less library. I have to wrap its calls with the threading, which has some limitations. Upcoming stable releases will use Netmiko until I find a more suitable solution. I’ve discovered two neat libraries: Scrapli and NetDev. The latter is lightweight and async-full, but was completely abandoned several years ago :( The former is alive and well-done, it is also async-full, but I can’t name it lightweight. There is also no official support for Windows. Let’s see what the future brings us, I’m in a centimeter (inch, for any poor soul who does not use the metric system) from developing my own solution (probably, based on a corpse of NetDev).</p> <p>Textual developers don’t stay at the same spot and they promise that the most expected (well, at least by me) widget – TextArea – is coming soon. That means I will interrupt all current Thymus-related tasks and start adopting this widget into it which gives us a powerful config editor. As I said previously, there are several nice features in a gift box for this occasion :)</p> <p>Stay <del>tuna</del>tuned!</p>

This time there are some noticeable changes were made. This experimental release is going to be the last one before the upcoming stable. The stable release will be based on this experimental without significant changes bringing better user experience and overall stability.

2023-09-01T00:00:00+00:002023-09-01T00:00:00+00:00http://thymus.dev/Experimental-0-1-3-f1-e4<p>Some minor changes were brought, and I’m hurrying to share them with you.</p> <h2 id="library-updates">Library updates</h2> <p>Textual is updated to <strong>0.35.1</strong>. This build brings nothing new, it’s just a matter of being up to date.</p> <p><em>For every new experimental release pay attention to the requirements.txt file!</em></p> <h2 id="keyboard-navigation-cont">Keyboard navigation (cont.)</h2> <p>I’m constantly searching for a better solution for keyboard navigation. This time I changed the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">Up</code> and <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">Down</code> arrow keys’ behavior when the Enhanced Tab mode is activated. Now it does not move a cursor over a list of choices in the Left sidebar. Moving a cursor didn’t make any sense actually, now it moves a screen of the Text field independent of the content of the Input field.</p> <h2 id="night-mode">Night mode</h2> <p>I’ve noticed that the Night mode’s setting hadn’t been preserved across the App runs. From this moment, there is a global setting <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">night_mode</code> in the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">settings.json</code>. Any changes for the mode inside Thymus are also saved in the file and will be active at the next run.</p> <h2 id="fixes">Fixes</h2> <p>Notorious case insensitive navigation drained much blood. There are again several fixes on that. Also, some overall stability fixes were made.</p> <p>Stay <del>tuna</del>tuned!</p>

Some minor changes were brought, and I’m hurrying to share them with you.

2023-08-23T00:00:00+00:002023-08-23T00:00:00+00:00http://thymus.dev/Experimental-0-1-3-f1-e3<p>Not so long after the first post about experimental features there is a new one.</p> <h2 id="library-updates">Library updates</h2> <p>Textual is updated to <strong>0.34.0</strong>. This build brings nothing new, it’s just a matter of being up to date.</p> <p><em>For every new experimental release pay attention to the requirements.txt file!</em></p> <h2 id="enhanced-tab">Enhanced Tab</h2> <p>For the Working screen moving a focus between the Text and the Input fields can be considered as tricky. From now, when the Input field is empty you can use <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">Tab</code> to move the focus to the Text field. However, when something is in this field, <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">Tab</code> works as usual (i.e., automatically completes an input).</p> <p>Previously, when in the Left sidebar there were several elements (at least two), <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">Tab</code> replaced a part of a user’s input to the sidebar’s highlighted value. The first option in the Left sidebar is highlighted by default, and, by moving the highlighting by the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">Down</code> arrow key, a user can select the desired one. Actually, I can’t name this logic broken, it is by design. Nevertheless, I added a new global setting <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">sidebar_strict_on_tab</code> which is enabled by default. Now, if there are two or more options in the Left sidebar, <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">Tab</code> completes an input to the most common beginning part among all elements of the sidebar. For example, if a user’s input is “r” and there are two options in the sidebar, “routing-options” and “routing-instances”, <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">Tab</code> completes the “r” to the “routing-“. After that, the user must decide which char is the next one and insert it.</p> <h2 id="ioss-heuristics">IOS’s heuristics</h2> <p>As described in the documentation, IOS-like platforms have two heuristics algorithms, one is basic and is enabled by default, another is more advanced and is disabled by default (but I’m pretty sure the latter deserves to be turned on forever). There is option to switch on and off the advanced mode, and now I added an option to do the same with the basic algorithm. This option is named as <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">base_heuristics</code>. When you switches it off, the parser won’t aggregate interfaces and route-maps into accessible sections.</p> <p>Stay <del>tuna</del>tuned!</p>

Not so long after the first post about experimental features there is a new one.

2023-08-19T00:00:00+00:002023-08-19T00:00:00+00:00http://thymus.dev/Experimental-0-1-3-f1-e2<p>Here it is, the first post about the experimental stuff! Below there are some development notes.</p> <h2 id="library-updates">Library updates</h2> <p>With every experimental release, I will try to synchronize versions of all dependencies to their current stable. With that release, Textual is aligned to <strong>0.33.0</strong>. Please, note that the 0.32.0 version has <strong>breaking changes</strong>. Also, for some features (see below) Thymus requires Netmiko now. With all of that, I set a Python version more precisely in the package requirements, it is 3.8.1 now.</p> <p><em>For every new experimental release pay attention to the requirements.txt file!</em></p> <h2 id="nx-os-support">NX-OS support</h2> <p>Several changes were required to adapt the IOS context module to support the NX-OS platform. The structure of the latter is the pretty same as the former but has some nitty differences. For example, an NX-OS context does not support a promiscuous setting, because this platform’s configuration always comes without the end keyword at its bottom.</p> <h2 id="from-network">From network</h2> <p>Using Thymus on a daily basis, I must admit it’s not always convenient to connect to network devices, save their configuration to files, and open them later in Thymus. Sometimes we don’t have a choice, but for the opposite case, I totally reduced an intermediate step, and Thymus can fetch a configuration by an SSH or Telnet connection. This feature requires Netmiko to be installed.</p> <p><img src="/images/thymus_from_network.png" alt="from_network" /></p> <p>In the Open dialog window now there are two tabs. By default, the From file tab is shown and it offers you the usual experience. The From network tab has several controls that allow you to set up a connection with a selected network device. You have to choose the platform on the left because it is not automatically deduced. After the connection is established, Thymus fetches a running configuration via this connection, closes the connection, and opens a configuration.</p> <p><em>A fetched configuration is only present in memory! To save it on a disk use the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">show | save ...</code> combination.</em></p> <h2 id="contains-sub-command">Contains sub-command</h2> <p>Imagine you need to find all VPLS instances or all instances with a specific RT pattern. The <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">filter</code> sub-command can show you lines that contain some keywords, but it is absolutely absent of a context. You never know where this line is stored. A wildcard matching can show you some sections by a pattern which is good, but it can’t look deeper into these sections.</p> <p>The new sub-command <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">contains</code> recursively searches all pattern matches for sections and finite instructions. For example, <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">show | contains "instance-type vpls;"</code> gives you all sections where this pattern lives. Narrowing your pattern gives you a more precise output! And yes, it supports PCRE!</p> <p><img src="/images/thymus_contains.png" alt="contains" /></p> <h2 id="qoe">QoE</h2> <p>I also pay attention to the quality of the experience. Not so far one of my friends who is totally new to Thymus was surprised by an emptiness of a working screen. Fair enough I must say. As the author, I perfectly understand what to do next, but not every user is also aware of these steps. For that reason after the start, there is help information on a screen. This information contains a list of all commands and their description. You can call this guide by the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">help</code> command at any time.</p> <p><img src="/images/thymus_help.png" alt="help" /></p> <p>The Left sidebar of a working screen is also slightly modified. Now it shows all sections of a current path. If you start typing something, the Left sidebar will work as usual, but when it’s empty, the sections will be shown again.</p> <p>The <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">save</code> sub-command now saves data into a dedicated folder by default. The path is <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">thymus/saves</code>. Before that, all files were saved in the root folder which created a lot of mess.</p> <p>JunOS context’s <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">go</code> command now is case-insensitive!</p> <p>There is a new alias for the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">filter</code> sub-command: <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">grep</code>.</p> <p>When the Input field is empty the Up and Down arrow keys now scroll a configuration if it is longer than your screen. This nitty change brings more flexibility to your navigation experience, but the next section brings much more to it!</p> <h2 id="improved-keyboard-navigation">Improved keyboard navigation</h2> <p>There are changes to the navigation through the Open dialog and the Working screen. The main goal here is to ease the experience of those users who prefer to use a keyboard rather than a mouse.</p> <p>Inside the Open dialog there are additional keyboard hotkeys now:</p> <ul> <li><code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">p</code> sets a focus to the platform selection block (the top-left element of the screen).</li> <li><code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">e</code> sets a focus to the encoding selection block.</li> <li><code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">t</code> sets a focus to the directory tree.</li> <li><code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">l</code> moves to a left tab.</li> <li><code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">r</code> moves to a right tab.</li> </ul> <p>The Working screen was also redesigned. First, all its elements, except the Text and Input fields, are not focusable anymore. So, despite a user still should use <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">Shift</code>+<code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">Tab</code> to escape the Input field, now it sets the focus to the Text field immediately, with no more intermediate elements! When the Text field is focused, it’s possible to use either <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">Tab</code> or <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">Shift</code>+<code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">Tab</code> to move the focus back to the Input.</p> <p>As the documentation states the only way to fully display long outputs is to use a mouse wheel. But now the Text field also supports the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">n</code> hotkey which appends data to its tail. So, no more barriers for the keyboard users!</p> <h2 id="screenshots">Screenshots</h2> <p>Yes! Textual has native support for screenshots. Use the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">Ctrl</code>+<code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">p</code> hotkey. Screenshots are saved into <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">thymus\saves\screenshots</code> folder in SVG format.</p> <h2 id="fixed-bugs">Fixed bugs</h2> <p>Platforms that are derived from its predecessor could be compared among themselves. For example, it was possible to compare EOS with IOS, NX-OS with EOS, etc.</p> <p>For IOS-like platforms the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">set spaces</code> command was too naive, I made it in a hurry. Now, it works as expected.</p> <p>Lots of fixes for syntax highlighting. This process is endless I believe.</p> <p>Stay <del>tuna</del>tuned!</p>

Here it is, the first post about the experimental stuff! Below there are some development notes.

2023-07-20T00:00:00+00:002023-07-20T00:00:00+00:00http://thymus.dev/Releases-0-1-3-and-f1<p>Recently a <a href="https://github.com/blademd/thymus/releases/tag/v0.1.3-alpha">major</a> Thymus update and <a href="https://github.com/blademd/thymus/releases/tag/v0.1.3.f1-alpha">the fast fix</a> just right after that have been posted. So, I believe, it’s time to talk about the project and its development perspectives.</p> <p>First of all, Thymus is at its alpha stage. I’m steadily increasing testing time, but nevertheless, there are still possible problems. Anyway, I believe the current release is pretty stable, and hypothetical bugs should not crash the app and influence its stability, but never believe a developer! Thymus tested with Python 3.8.5 release, but it should also work with 3.7 and later releases, although it is not tested. Releases under 3.7 do not support. Later I’m going to make a package for PyPI registry. That should facilitate testing the app for a variety of releases.</p> <p>Thymus is planned as a full-blown editor then just a browser. At this moment of time, Textual, the lib Thymus uses for its UI, does not support text editing capabilities. Textual’s developers have plans to release a text editing widget, and I hope, sooner than later it will happen. As soon it happens Thymus also will bring it. I have plans for some interesting features for this.</p> <p>The next important point is that the project has detailed documentation which you can find on <a href="https://github.com/blademd/thymus/wiki">GitHub’s Wiki</a> pages.</p> <p>I’m not going to spam with frequent releases. The main branch is pretty stable and won’t change often. There is no strict schedule for any type’s release, but I suppose a window of one to two months. For every major release, there are possible fixing releases with the f-prefix. For more frequent releases I created the experimental branch. Some features from this branch will shape the next major release, some will be skipped forever. If you want to be more in touch switch to the experimental.</p> <p>Thymus supports the most popular systems (probably except Huawei) and I’m not going to add others in the nearest time. Now, I want to concentrate on config analysis features. So the next releases will bring some features from this field.</p> <p>Stay <del>tuna</del>tuned!</p>

Recently a major Thymus update and the fast fix just right after that have been posted. So, I believe, it’s time to talk about the project and its development perspectives.

2023-07-17T00:00:00+00:002023-07-17T00:00:00+00:00http://thymus.dev/First-post<p>On these pages, I’m going to describe the development process, some news, and other related Thymus stuff. The upcoming post will discuss the current release, the project structure, and some plans for the future.</p> <p>Stay <del>tuna</del>tuned!</p>

On these pages, I’m going to describe the development process, some news, and other related Thymus stuff. The upcoming post will discuss the current release, the project structure, and some plans for the future.