Orateur
Description
Many developers, in the EPICS community and otherwise, spend the majority of their time within a terminal environment, utilizing command-line tools and text-based editors. However, interacting with EPICS Process Variables (PVs) during development and testing often requires switching to comparatively heavy graphical display managers. This talk introduces PVTUI, a C++ library designed to bridge this gap by enabling the creation of lightweight, EPICS-aware terminal user interfaces (TUIs).
Built upon the FTXUI and EPICS pvAccessCPP libraries, PVTUI provides a set of interactive text-based widgets. These include input boxes, dropdown menus, and buttons that mimic the styling of classic EPICS display managers. The library provides a type-safe framework for monitoring and controlling PVs, supporting both Channel Access and pvAccess protocols.
In addition to the core library, the PVTUI repository includes several ready-to-use applications for common EPICS records, such as motor, asyn, transform, calcout, and sequence. It also features a strip chart application to monitor and plot live PV values directly in the terminal. As a text-based tool, PVTUI applications are uniquely suited for use over SSH connections, providing a responsive experience without the overhead of display server forwarding.