PyOhio 2026
Your favorite piece of hardware is losing vendor support. The official software is proprietary, and the open-source alternative is a terminal command with a wall of flags you have to look up every time. What if you could wrap it in a beautiful, keyboard-driven text user interface (TUI) built entirely in Python?
We will explore the role of the TUI along the spectrum of user interface paradigms. In doing so, we will use document scanning as a concrete example of how a TUI can offer a more user-friendly method to interact with the command line, while avoiding the (often unnecessary) complexity of a full graphical user interface. We will cover how to build a simple TUI application using Textual, a modern Python framework for rich terminal interfaces. In this demonstration, our application will act as a frontend to the popular Scanner Access Now Easy (SANE) API.
Attendees will leave with a working mental model of Textual's component and event system, practical patterns for async subprocess management in a UI context, and a reusable architecture they can adapt to their own projects.
