Recent content on Darren Burns
I’ve been working on improving the startup time of Posting recently.
 Posting is a TUI application built with Textual , and written in Python, for managing and sending HTTP requests. 
 
 
 
 
 
 This post is an overview of some of the techniques (and hacks) I used and the gains made, including: 
 
 Using python -X importtime to measure import times. 
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After three years of working full-time on Textual, it’s finally time to move on and find a new challenge. 
 Over the course of three years, I’ve worked with some amazing colleagues, been part of a fantastic community of open-source developers, and had the opportunity to work on the most interesting projects of my career so far. We took Textual from a proof-of-concept to version 1.0…
Posting is a powerful HTTP client that runs entirely inside your terminal. 
 Version 2.0 has just arrived, bringing some powerful new features to Posting, including scripting, keymaps, and more! 
 
 Posting 2.0 - a TUI HTTP client 
 
 











 
 
 ## Pre-request and post-response scripts
 
 A common feature…
Textual 0.82.0 adds support for keymaps , which make it easy to customise keybindings based on config or user preferences. 
 Keymaps allow you to swap the keys associated with a Binding at runtime with a single method call. 
 
 You could switch to a Vim keymap if a user of your app enables “Vim mode”. 
 You could read a keymap from a file on the users drive and swap it…
Terminal emulators are in general quite limited when it comes to copying and pasting.
Fortunately, we have a few options when writing Textual apps which allow us to add support for copy and paste.
Each has its own trade-offs.
Let’s explore these options and look at how we can integrate them into our apps. 










 
 
 ##…
Fractional units ( fr ) are a tool in Textual’s CSS system which lets you distribute space between child widgets inside a container in a really intuitive way. 
 I use them everywhere in my Textual apps, but I get the feeling that they may be a little under-appreciated. 
 fr units make it easy to implement many common layout patterns, and have some less obvious benefits too! 
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Over the years I’ve developed several open source projects. 
 The majority are written in Python, and they’re typically terminal-based developer tools. 










 
 
 ## Posting
 
 Posting is a powerful TUI for working with HTTP APIs.
It’s a bit like Postman, except it runs in the terminal and is designed around…
An incomplete collection of things I really like. 










 
 
 ## Books
 
 I mostly read fantasy and sci-fi. 
 
 The Will of the Many | James Islington | Fantasy 
 Powder Mage Series | Brian McClellan | Fantasy 
 Children of Time | Adrian Tchaikovsky | Sci-fi 
 Hyperion (book 1) | Dan Simmons | Sci-fi 
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