It's a Live

It's a Live is a utility that helps you make live coding demos less error-prone by taking the "live" component and killing it.

Installation

You can install It's a Live with pip:

pip install itsalive

Usage

Using It's a Live is pretty simple: Just write some keystrokes or commands in a file and run itsalive with it:

itsalive <command_file>

It's a Live will wait for you to press a key, and, when you do, it will instead emit one character from the command file. This way, you can type whatever old crap and it will look perfectly rehearsed, every time, with no backspaces (unless you add them in). It will also wait for you to press Enter at the end of commands, so you will never skip ahead to the next command by mistake.

What's more, It's a Live is actually running the commands you're typing, so you have full interoperability with other programs.

It's a Live also supports various commands:

• Ctrl+d will immediately terminate the playback.
• Ctrl+p will pause automatic playback and give you control of the terminal. This is useful for doing actually live stuff, just make sure to leave everything in a state so that playback can resume later.
• Ctrl+f will skip forward to the next command.
• Ctrl+b will skip back to the previous command.
• Ctrl+u will send a Ctrl+u keystroke (wiping anything on to the left of the cursor) and rewind the current command.
• Ctrl+e will type out the current command in its entirety.

More stuff

It's a Live supports sending the commands via UDP to another window, so you can see what will be typed while you present. To see the commands, run netcat in UDP server mode on port 5345:

nc -kul 5345

If you want to leave yourself notes, you can add comments to the command file. Comments must start with ## as the first thing on the line, and they will not be typed. They will only be sent via UDP to the listening server.

License

It's a Live is licensed under the GPL v3 or any later version.