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In praise of rich, rich-cli and Textual

Publish date: 27 May 2022
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I’ve been using Will McGugan’s rich-cli on my terminal in the last month or so and I cannot recommend it enough. It leverages the astonishing capacity of Will’s rich Python library to provide a viewer for a variety of files which produces beautiful output with no tweaking required. I’ve used it for CSV and JSON files and it can also do Markdown and a heap of others, with options for text width, choice of theme and much other magic.

I tweeted an example of looking at CSV’s recently:

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The JSON and Markdown support is also impressive:

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I’m quite sure there are many tools available for each of these use cases that are as good or better for the individual file types - jq for JSON, for example. I see the strength of rich-cli as being a very good way of looking at a bunch of different file types with the same tool, without me needing to remember or install a tool per file type. This has become a great productivity boost while also giving gorgeous results.

rich is also well worth looking at for Python projects - a single line is worth many times the cost of the bytes:

from rich import print

A rather contrived example of using it for print():

import rich

d = {
    "owner": "Mary",
    "pets": [
        {
            "type": "lamb",
            "size": "little",
            "specs": {"fleece": "snow"},
            "behaviour": [
                {"action": "follow", "likelihood": 100},
            ],
        }
    ],
}
print(d)
rich.print(d)

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It will also do wonders with your tracebacks and other outputs, and I’m not doing it justice at all by barely scratching the surface. Will covered it in-depth in this Talk Python episode and still didn’t get to cover everything it can do.

I haven’t even got to the most ambitious of Will’s projects - Textual is a simple, quick and frankly astonishingly powerful tool for building Terminal User Interfaces (TUIs). I begrudgingly write a terrible looking, clunky GUI when I have to, although my users are normally lucky to even get a CLI. With Textual in my arsenal though I’m going to be much happier to make a TUI instead of a CLI, which has the strong potential to also be the GUI and/or web interface to my tool with no further work on my part.

Keep an eye on Textualize, the firm Will has formed to develop rich, Textual and tools in their vein - given the excellence of the tools further fantastic developments will be coming our way.