pyte is an in memory VTXXX-compatible terminal emulator. XXX stands for a series video terminals, developed by DEC between 1970 and 1995. The first, and probably the most famous one, was VT100 terminal, which is now a de-facto standard for all virtual terminal emulators. pyte follows the suit.

Why would one need a terminal emulator library?

- To screen scrape terminal apps, for example htop or aptitude.
- To write cross platform terminal emulators; either with a graphical (xterm, rxvt) or a web interface, like AjaxTerm.
- To have fun, hacking on the ancient, poorly documented technologies.

Note: pyte started as a fork of vt102, which is an incomplete implementation of VT100 features.

If you have setuptools you can use easy_install -U pyte. Otherwise, you can download the source from GitHub and run python setup.py install.

 >>> import pyte
 >>> screen = pyte.Screen(80, 24)
 >>> stream = pyte.Stream()
 >>> stream.attach(screen)
 >>> stream.feed(u"\u001b7\u001b[?47h\u001b)0\u001b[H\u001b[2J\u001b[H"
 u"\u001b[2;1HNetHack, Copyright 1985-2003\r\u001b[3;1"
 u"H By Stichting Mathematisch Centrum and M. "
 u"Stephenson.\r\u001b[4;1H See license for de"
 u"tails.\r\u001b[5;1H\u001b[6;1H\u001b[7;1HShall I pi"
 u"ck a character's race, role, gender and alignment f"
 u"or you? [ynq] ")
 >>> screen.display
 [' ',
 'NetHack, Copyright 1985-2003 ',
 ' By Stichting Mathematisch Centrum and M. Stephenson. ',
 ' See license for details. ',
 ' ',
 ' ',
 "Shall I pick a character's race, role, gender and alignment for you? [ynq] ",
 ' ',
 ' ',
 ' ',
 ' ',
 ' ',
 ' ',
 ' ',
 ' ',
 ' ',
 ' ',
 ' ',
 ' ',
 ' ',
 ' ',
 ' ',
 ' ',
 ' ']
 >>>

pyte is not alone in the weird world of terminal emulator libraries, here's a few other options worth checking out: Termemulator, pyqonsole, webtty AjaxTerm