Dev Tools · 1h ago
Textual TUI crash shows why escaping user text isn't enough
A developer's terminal UI built with Textual and Rich crashed when a Terraform error message containing square brackets was rendered, because Rich treats brackets as markup. Escaping the user content failed because Textual's own parser doesn't honor Rich's escape convention. The fix required four commits and three wrong turns to handle bracket characters safely across different parsers.
Meridian48 take
This is a cautionary tale for developers building TUIs: escaping user input is parser-specific, and relying on a single escape function can leave your app vulnerable to crashes from ordinary text.
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[type='CNAME'] crashed my Textual TUI: why escaping user text isn't enough →
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