Rich Text and Beautiful Formatting in the Terminal with Rich Python

In this tutorial we will be exploring Rich – a python package for working with rich text and beautiful formatting in the terminal or command prompt.

First of all let see some of the benefits we can do with this package.

Adding Color and Style to Text
Emoji
Markdown
Syntax Highlighting
Tables In the Terminal

Rich can be very useful when building CLI especially when you want to add some beautification to your CLI, you can check out more on how to building CLI and the many ways we can make your CLI fancy here.

Let us see how to work with rich.

Installation

pip install rich

Rich requires another packages called commonmark. Hence if you do not have it you can also install it along side rich

Adding Color and Style To Text

First of all let us import the package

from rich.console import Console

You can then create a Console instance and store it inside a variable to use if for your task

console = Console()

Using Console().print()

You can add colors to text in two ways using the style format or the span format

# Text/Color
console.print("Hello world",style='bold red')
console.print("[u]Hello[/u] [bold cyan]Jesse[/bold cyan]")

Using print

You can also import a custom print function from rich which will overide the normal python print function

from rich import print
print("Hello [bold magenta]Jesse[/bold magenta]")

Working with Emojis

With rich you can display emojis or their unicode in your terminal.

# Emoji
console.print("I :heart: coding :smiley:")

Rendering Markdown in the Terminal

You can render markdown inside the terminal using the Markdown from the rich.markdown submodule. This is where you may need the commonmark if not installed already on your system.

from rich.markdown import Markdown
# Markdown
with open("README.md") as md:
     markdown = Markdown(md.read())
     console.print(markdown)

Displaying Code Syntax

from rich.syntax import Syntax

my_code = """
def hello(name):
return "Hello {}".format(name)
"""

# Syntax
synt = Syntax(my_code,"python",theme='monokai',line_numbers=True)
console.print(synt)

Showing Tables in the Terminal

With rich you can also display nice tables in your terminal

from rich.table import Table,Column

table = Table(show_header=True,header_style="bold cyan")

# Define Column 
table.add_column("Title",style="dim",width=12)
table.add_column("Author",style="dim",width=12)

# Add your Data into the Rows
table.add_row("Python Handbook","Wes Mickn")

console.print(table)

Of course there are a lot of things you can do with Rich, you can check their docs for more.

You can also check the video tutorial below for more

Thank you for your attention

Jesus Saves

Jesse E.Agbe(JCharis)

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