Change to the beets UI

[davidswarbrick]

Hi all,

Over the past 8 (:cold_sweat:) years there's been some suggestions for a new beets UI, with the code detailed in PR #3721 .

It looks like this:

There's a discourse discussion about it, in which I detail some instructions on how to setup and test the branch. However, in order to ensure those who prefer GitHub Discussions aren't left out, I thought I'd make a poll here to gauge community interest in the changes.
Please feel free to vote if you're unable to test, although it would be extra helpful if you can try out my changes and report back any bugs or preferences for things you'd like to see altered.

I'm a huge fan of beets and its community, I hope you enjoy these changes as much as I have when using them myself 😄

[JOJ0]

If you've installed beets from the official git repo already, here's how to quickly checkout the feature branch within that repo:

git remote add davidswarbrick https://github.com/davidswarbrick/beets.git
git fetch -v davidswarbrick
git checkout --track davidswarbrick/ui

HTH

[arsaboo]

@JOJ0 I normally install/upgrade beets using pip install --upgrade --force-reinstall --no-deps git+https://github.com/beetbox/beets.git.

How do you recommend I checkout this branch?

[JOJ0]

The syntax for adding a branch with your command is attaching @branch to the repo uri.

I think

https://github.com/davidswarbrick/beets.git@ui

[JOJ0]

@arsaboo did that work?

[JOJ0]

Another option, and what I personally do, is cherry picking commits into my "personal beets version". In this case we only have 2 commits, so that's straight forward (providing the remote and its data is known already - see my prev post):

git checkout my_personal_dev_branch
git cherry-pick 23f8e0df 9f6236bb

[Emporea]

What about beetarr?

[JOJ0]

Hi, what is / or does beetarr mean @Emporea?

[Emporea]

I mean this:

https://github.com/sentriz/betanin

[JOJ0]

Thoughts about colors thread.

[JOJ0]

Please, if you have played around with these "hard to read" color-settings on your end, post here which one's to change to make it better readable. I guess it must be only one or two variables that have to be changed in config_default.yaml. When we have it documented in here, David or me could easily integrate it into the PR.

[davidswarbrick]

I've managed to recreate @arsaboo's setup (i.e. PuTTY defaults). I found the best balance between readability & design seems to be this combination:

The diff to recreate is:

--- a/beets/config_default.yaml
+++ b/beets/config_default.yaml
@@ -102,11 +102,11 @@ ui:
         text_highlight: ['bold', 'red']
         text_highlight_minor: ['white']
         action_default: ['bold', 'cyan']
-        action: ['bold', 'blue']
+        action: ['bold', 'cyan']
         # New Colors
         text: ['normal']
         text_faint: ['faint']
-        import_path: ['bold', 'inverse', 'blue']
+        import_path: ['bold', 'blue']
         import_path_items: ['bold', 'blue']
         added:   ['green']
         removed: ['red']
@@ -117,7 +117,7 @@ ui:
         text_diff_added:   ['bold', 'red']
         text_diff_removed: ['bold', 'red']
         text_diff_changed: ['bold', 'red']
-        action_description: ['blue']
+        action_description: ['white']
     import:
         indentation:
             match_header: 2

Window 10's default cmd.exe looks much easier on the eye than PuTTY (and hence is now my usual default on Windows systems), with the original config:

[JOJ0]

I actually wanted to say: Screw this, we can't support any terminal app with bad colorscheme support (Sorry putty I didn't want to hurt your feelings, but there is Windows Terminal now and duh it does a better job than you do ;)))) hahaha);
but since you changed this quickly David, I'm very fine with it and certainly stay with my opinion that going fail-safe is probably the best choice for new beets users.

Nevertheless what I realise now is that we should add some docs https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/config.html#colors, well, we could add something new. Actually the docs are not outdated, those options described are still valid with the new UI. We could even make it quick and point to the "self-descriptive names in config_default.yaml" - that should be enough for colors IMHO.

The import options block though requires some docs I think: https://github.com/beetbox/beets/pull/3721/files#diff-608081b9e86676fedcbc02b402def894b85f87a8c4e6f0495a87bc2119cbb8bdR121-R126

Anyway @davidswarbrick I want to hit that merge button soon! I would also like to help with docs and will try during the next week, but can't promise since I should be working on something else actually which I kind of postpone constantly......haha

[RollingStar]

Because of this ui branch I souped up my putty config and it's much better. https://www.linux.com/training-tutorials/improving-putty-settings-windows/

[JOJ0]

Especially this part. OMG! Finally someone writing this down... 😆

[JOJ0]

As @arsaboo suggested, there is another simple way of installing beets from this development version:

pip install --upgrade --force-reinstall --no-deps git+https://github.com/davidswarbrick/beets.git@ui

To revert your installation to the official git master version again, do

pip install --upgrade --force-reinstall --no-deps git+https://github.com/beetbox/beets.git

[arsaboo]

Yes, that is how I am currently installing this dev version.

[RollingStar]

Some screenshots:

Advanced putty: looks excellent! I recommend changing putty defaults if yours doesn't look like this.

Basic putty - looks pretty good!

For completeness, here's how it looks in -vv mode - not ideal, but out of scope here.