gnspy — complete help for GNS Animator4

This repo is the complete documentation site and PyPI package for scripting GNS Animator4 with gnspy: commands, usage guides, scripting tutorials, and hand-written, fully-typed PEP 484 stub files for the compiled gnspy and gnsgui Python extension modules.

The stubs serve two purposes at once:

• Static typing / IDE autocomplete — drop-in stubs for the compiled modules.
• API documentation — every symbol carries a NumPy-style docstring that griffe parses, so the same files can feed mkdocstrings. (Docstring-in-stub is intentional; see the ruff notes below.)

Note that pyproject.toml (the PyPI package: name, version, stub-checking tooling) and zensical.toml (the docs site: commands/usage/scripting + generated API reference) intentionally describe the project at different scopes — one ships the stubs, the other documents the whole product.

Contents

File	Classes	Notes
gnspy.pyi	89 API classes + 19 enums	Model, scan, presentation, view, results, GUI-adjacent handles + the global GNS/gns handle
gnsgui.pyi	26 classes	Qt-based widget toolkit for custom dialogs inside Animator
pyproject.toml	—	PyPI package metadata + ruff/mypy/ty/pyrefly/griffe dev tooling (strict, with documented ignores)
zensical.toml, docs/	—	The documentation site (commands, usage, scripting, API reference)

Running the checks

The stub-checking tools are pinned dev dependencies (see [dependency-groups] in pyproject.toml), so run them via uv run:

uv run ruff    check          gnspy.pyi gnsgui.pyi
uv run ruff    format --check gnspy.pyi gnsgui.pyi
uv run mypy    --strict --config-file pyproject.toml gnspy.pyi gnsgui.pyi
uv run ty      check          gnspy.pyi gnsgui.pyi
uv run pyrefly check          gnspy.pyi gnsgui.pyi

All of the above pass with zero errors.

griffe cannot discover a lone .pyi (no companion .py); to validate docstring parsing, place the stub beside an empty module of the same name and run uv run griffe dump gnspy -s <dir> -d numpy. In production, point mkdocstrings at the installed compiled module and let it merge these stubs.

Documentation site

The docs site (built with Zensical) lives under docs/ and is configured in zensical.toml:

uv run zensical serve   # preview at localhost:8000
uv run zensical build   # static output in site/

ruff configuration — why ALL minus a few rules

pyproject.toml selects every ruff rule (select = ["ALL"]) and ignores only rules that are fundamentally incompatible with a documentation-bearing stub that mirrors an external, non-PEP8 C++ API we do not control:

• PYI021, D418 — forbid docstrings in stubs / on overloads. We deliberately embed NumPy docstrings (including per-overload ones) for griffe/mkdocstrings.
• N802/N803/N815/N816, A002/A003 — the real API is camelCase and uses argument names like id/type/filter; renaming would break user calls.
• FBT001/FBT002 — the real API exposes boolean parameters (e.g. indirect).
• COM812, ISC001 — conflict with the formatter.

Every other rule (including the full D pydocstyle set under the NumPy convention, and PYI* stub rules) is enforced.

Caveat — inferred enum integer values

Six enums have integer values taken directly from the source dump and are authoritative: Element, Property, Item, View, Analysis, Function.

The other 13 enums (ArrowPosition, BorderMode, Event, FontStyle, FrameSide, FunctionItem, LabelPosition, LegendPosition, LineStyle, MarkerStyle, PageOrientation, PolygonType, Presentation) have member names grounded in the appendix docs, but their integer values are not published anywhere — they are assigned by convention. Each such enum's docstring says so. Reference these members by name, not by numeric value. If the real integer values are ever recovered (e.g. from a running Animator), update them.