Content Disappearing on with nested `width: auto` widgets about textual HOT 6 CLOSED

Out of interest, why are you inheriting from Widget rather than Static?

Well, There's no particular reason but Static is stated as a widget that holds static content that can be updated.
Widget is a general name that hints that it's a base class which you can build upon

Plus, the other widgets provided by textual such as Placeholder, Input, Button etc all inherit the base Widget class. These, I think (inbuilt compound widgets), serve as a great starting point when building complicated widgets

I hope that makes sense.

Also, It's been quite a while since I started building with textual before the documentation was even released so I guess it is also a habit to inherit from Widget haha

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If you take a look at the source code for Static, you'll see there's a shrink attribute which is set to False.

This shrink attribute is True by default in the base Widget class, meaning the renderable will shrink to fill the container. Since your container doesn't have a explicit size, it won't be visible as it will shrink to nothing.

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I see now, that works! :D
But I was lucky enough to discover that it works with the Static Widget. Maybe this should be added as a note or warning in the docs?

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Out of interest, why are you inheriting from Widget rather than Static? Obviously this code is just a MRE which is much appreciated, but it might be useful to understand the context.

The documentation about creating custom widgets does suggest using Static as a better starting point, although not because of this auto size issue. I think the guide for creating custom widgets could definitely could be improved, so your feedback would be helpful.

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Like Tom points out, it was the fact that shrink was set to True that did this (Widget.shrink docs: https://textual.textualize.io/api/widget/#textual.widget.Widget.shrink).

None of the other widgets that inherit from Widget set width: auto, which is why this one looked different from the others.

Given that the issue of the disappearing content was solved by Tom's comment, I'll close this issue!

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