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.

It's a Live lets you write commands and keystrokes in a file, which it will then read and open a new terminal for you. Every time you press a key, It's a Live will write one character from the file into the terminal, making it look like you're typing every single command with the practiced ease of a consummate professional.

Installation

You can install It's a Live with pip:

pip install itsalive

That's about it.

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.

Special commands

There are special commands you can add to your files. The line must start with them, with no spaces before them.

##@include <filename>: This inserts the contents of <filename> at the position of the include command.

Example: ##@include somefile.py.

License

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

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my bestie Ian Cromwell, without whom this project would be nameless.