🧶 Knittingmachine

A simple, light, and clean UI to write threads — built with Python and Streamlit.

Motivation

I've always preferred the depth and narrative flow of threads over single posts. However, the existing interfaces and third-party apps felt too cluttered and distracting for this purpose. This led me to test my newly acquired Python skills into creating a simple, clean, and intuitive UI for writing and managing threads. Bear in mind, the code may be a bit unpolished, but it's a genuine reflection of my learning journey building my first app!

Features

• Label and write threads that auto-save in a thread_label.txt local file
• Add and remove text areas from your thread
• Text areas feature character count with a color warning when you exceed the 280 character limit
• Character count manages URL and emoji count exceptions
• Navigate and delete saved threads from the Threads tab

Installing Knittingmachine

Prerequisits

• Python 3.11
• Streamlit

Set up your environment

Regardless of which package management tool you're using, I recommend running the commands on this page in a virtual environment. This ensures that the dependencies pulled in for Knittingmachine don't impact any other Python projects you're working on.

Install and run Knittingmachine

1. Navigate to your project directory:

   cd your_project_directory

2. Activate your virtual environment

3. Install project requirements:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

4. Test that you have Streamlit installed:

   streamlit hello

5. Streamlit's Hello app should appear in a new tab in your web browser! To stop the Streamlit server, press ctrl-C.

6. Create a local clone of Knittingmachine to your project directory:

   git clone https://github.com/monicazng/knittingmachine

7. Now you can use Python and Streamlit to run Knittingmachine locally!

   streamlit run app.py

   A new tab in your web browser should pop up running Knittingmachine locally!

Remember that this is app runs locally on your computer.

Limitations

• When the thread label is empty and a text area is edited, an empty name .py file is created with no warning and subsequent threads following this pattern will replace the content of previous threads with no thread label
• When the thread label is filled after a text area has been edited, a thread_label.py file is created but it won't show in the Threads dropdown until a new text area is created or the app is refreshed
• Since images don't affect the character count, they have been disregarded in this implementation

Roadmap

• Saved threads: add delete thread functionality
• New threads: add change text order functionality
• Saved threads: addd editing functionality

Contributions

Contributions, issues and feature requests are welcome.

Author

• Twitter: @monicazng
• Github: @monicazng

License

This project is GNU GPL v2 licensed.