As part of a unix CLI utility, I would like to implement a widget to help the user act on the contents of this one directory (which is special for this utility).

(FWIW, the directory interface I have in mind is inspired by Emacs's dired mode, although for my purposes I need only a small subset of dired's functionality.)

So, to be more specific, I'm looking for a *simple* urwid-based implementation of a "navigable table of records", with the properties similar to the following (they are all quite basic and commonplace by today's standards):

• the table takes up the entire window (irrespective of the number of records available), and consists of one fixed header row at the top the window, one message/status row at the bottom, and a records "pane" in-between, showing as many records as can be accommodated in the available space;
  
• the table can be "navigated" by pressing the up- and down-arrow keys; here "navigation" consists of nothing more than changing the record that "has the focus", aka, "the current record", as indicated by a change of color (e.g. reverse video), or simply by the vertical position (i.e. the row) of a typical character-sized rectangular cursor;
• all records consist of the same number of fields, and always take up one row per record (hence, field contents are clipped if necessary);
  
• all fields except for the rightmost have fixed widths; the width of the rightmost field expands to fill up the window's width; only the width of the rightmost field is affected by resizing of the containing window.

I am hoping that this bare-bones functionality can be implemented very simply with urwid.  ISimplicity is essential for me here, because, although I have been programming for decades, I have no prior experience whatsoever programming text-based UIs, and only minimal experience with GUI programming).

So, if anyone knows of a *simple* urwid implementation of an interface similar to the one outlined above, and that I could at least study, please point me to it.

Thanks!

PS: I was really excited to discover urwid and to find the example file browser at http://excess.org/urwid/browser/examples/browse.py, since I thought I could adapt this code to what I'm trying to do.  But, after studying browse.py for a few hours (along with the rest of the urwid docs), I had to give up.  I just couldn't wrap my brain around it!  Clearly, browse.py is well beyond my IQ.  In fact, after inspecting browse.py, I now fear that urwid in general is beyond my IQ.  So I'm bummed, because I was really psyched to use urwid for this.  What keeps this hope still alive is that, since the functionality I have in mind is *significantly simpler* than browse.py's (for example, I don't need tree navigation, with expanding and collapsing of nodes, etc.), an urwid-based implementation of it may still be something that I can handle.  Hence my first post to the urwid list.


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