Rich Output

Rich renders formatted text, tables, progress bars, and syntax highlighting in the terminal. It makes CLI output readable without sacrificing scriptability.

Recipe

uv add rich

from rich.console import Console
console = Console()
console.print("[bold green]Success![/bold green] Deployed v1.2.3")

When to reach for this:

• Human-facing CLI output (tables, status dashboards)
• Long-running operations needing progress bars
• Syntax-highlighted config or log display

Working Example

from rich.console import Console
from rich.table import Table
from rich.progress import track
from rich.syntax import Syntax
import time
 
console = Console()
 
def show_users(users: list[dict]):
    table = Table(title="Active Users")
    table.add_column("ID", style="cyan", justify="right")
    table.add_column("Email")
    table.add_column("Role", style="magenta")
    for u in users:
        table.add_row(str(u["id"]), u["email"], u["role"])
    console.print(table)
 
def process_files(paths: list[str]):
    for path in track(paths, description="Processing..."):
        time.sleep(0.1)  # simulate work
    console.print("[green]Done![/green]")
 
def show_config(yaml_text: str):
    syntax = Syntax(yaml_text, "yaml", theme="monokai", line_numbers=True)
    console.print(syntax)

What this demonstrates:

• Tables with styled columns for structured data
• track() wraps iterables with a progress bar
• Syntax highlights code and config files
• Markup [green] for inline styling

Deep Dive

Output Modes

Gotchas

• Rich output in piped commands - ANSI codes in files. Fix: Console(force_terminal=False) or --plain flag.
• Progress bar on stderr - correct default. Fix: do not redirect progress to stdout.
• Tables for script consumption - breaks parsing. Fix: --json flag for machine output; Rich for default human mode.
• Logging via print - no levels or timestamps. Fix: rich.logging.RichHandler for structured logs.
• Huge tables - terminal overflow. Fix: paginate or limit rows with --limit flag.

Alternatives

FAQs

Related

• CLI Basics - stdout/stderr conventions
• Click - CLI framework integration
• Interactive Prompts - user input
• CLI Best Practices - output guidelines

Stack versions: This page was written for Python 3.14.0, FastAPI 0.115+, Django 5.2, Flask 3.1, Pydantic 2, PyTorch 2.6+, pandas 2.2+, Polars 1.x, ruff 0.9+, and uv 0.6+.

636f64656775696465732e696f7c6367696f3633357c323032363037