terminal

What can be known about the screen a plot is printed to.

This library builds strings, and a string does not know where it will be shown. The little that can be found out about the terminal on the other end is found out here, so that the plots and the animations can share one answer and one account of how much it is worth.

• terminal_size: How large the attached terminal is, if there is one.

Nothing in this library changes what it writes based on what this module reports. A measurement can settle a size the caller left open, and it can decide whether a warning is warranted; it can never override a size the caller gave, and there is no fallback for its absence, because a plot that quietly came out a different shape in a pipe than on a screen would be worse than one that says it could not tell.

terminal_size() -> os.terminal_size | None : source

The size of the attached terminal, or None if stdout is not one.

Returns:

• size : os.terminal_size | None. The number of columns and lines the terminal has, or None if stdout is anything else: a pipe, a file, a captured stream.

shutil.get_terminal_size is the wrong tool for this. Its job is to paper over the absence of a terminal by returning a fallback size, and a fallback is exactly what must not be mistaken for a measurement. Asking the file descriptor directly tells the two apart.

The size is read fresh on each call, since a terminal can be resized between one call and the next.