Rich & Textual

Rich makes terminal output readable - colors, tables, progress bars, syntax-highlighted tracebacks. Textual builds on Rich to create full terminal user interfaces (TUIs) with widgets, layouts, and async events. Together they replace brittle print debugging and curses boilerplate.

Recipe

from rich.console import Console
from rich.table import Table
 
console = Console()
table = Table(title="Deploy Status")
table.add_column("Service")
table.add_column("Version")
table.add_row("api", "2.1.0")
table.add_row("worker", "2.1.0")
console.print(table)

When to reach for this:

• CLI tools that operators run daily (deploy, migrate, data fixes)
• Long-running scripts needing progress feedback
• Internal dashboards without a web UI budget
• Pretty error output during local development

Working Example

from __future__ import annotations
 
import time
from dataclasses import dataclass
 
from rich.console import Console
from rich.progress import Progress, SpinnerColumn, TextColumn, BarColumn, TaskProgressColumn
 
 
@dataclass
class Job:
    name: str
    rows: int
 
 
def process_jobs(jobs: list[Job]) -> None:
    console = Console(stderr=True)
    with Progress(
        SpinnerColumn(),
        TextColumn("[bold blue]{task.description}"),
        BarColumn(),
        TaskProgressColumn(),
        console=console,
    ) as progress:
        task_id = progress.add_task("Processing", total=sum(j.rows for j in jobs))
        for job in jobs:
            progress.update(task_id, description=job.name)
            for _ in range(job.rows):
                time.sleep(0.01)
                progress.advance(task_id)
    console.print("[green]Done[/green]")
 
 
if __name__ == "__main__":
    process_jobs([Job("users", 50), Job("orders", 30)])

What this demonstrates:

• Console(stderr=True) keeps stdout free for piping
• Progress composes columns for spinner, label, bar, and percent
• Task description updates per job name
• Color markup ([green]) without manual escape codes

Deep Dive

How It Works

• Console - Detects terminal width, color support, and emoji rendering; falls back gracefully in CI logs.
• Markup - [bold red]error[/] style tags; console.print(obj) pretty-prints dataclasses and dicts.
• Live display - rich.live.Live refreshes tables or logs in place without flicker.
• Textual - Event-driven TUI framework; apps subclass App, define compose() for widgets, handle on_button_pressed etc.

Rich vs Textual

Python Notes

# Install Rich tracebacks globally in a CLI entrypoint
from rich.traceback import install
install(show_locals=True)
 
# Textual minimal app skeleton
from textual.app import App, ComposeResult
from textual.widgets import Header, Footer, Static
 
class HelloApp(App):
    def compose(self) -> ComposeResult:
        yield Header()
        yield Static("Hello from Textual")
        yield Footer()
 
if __name__ == "__main__":
    HelloApp().run()

Gotchas

• Printing tables to stdout in piped CLIs - Breaks downstream jq or grep. Fix: Console(file=sys.stderr) for human output.
• Assuming color in CI - Some runners strip ANSI. Fix: Console(force_terminal=True) only when needed; test in plain mode.
• Textual without async discipline - Blocking time.sleep in handlers freezes the UI. Fix: await asyncio.sleep or run_worker.
• Huge tables in narrow terminals - Columns truncate confusingly. Fix: table.add_column(..., overflow="fold") or export CSV.
• Rich in library code unconditionally - Forces Rich as a hard dependency for consumers. Fix: optional pretty output behind a --verbose flag.
• Logging handler duplication - Rich LoggingHandler plus stdlib handler doubles lines. Fix: configure one handler tree.

Alternatives

FAQs

Related

• CLI Tools Basics - argparse/typer entrypoints
• Errors & Logging Basics - structured logging patterns
• pytest Setup - testing CLI tools
• Shell Productivity - terminal workflow

External Related Links

• Python Package Index (PyPI) - Official repository of Python packages.
• Read the Docs - Hosting for thousands of Python project documentations.
• Real Python - In-depth tutorials, courses, and practical guides.
• Fluent Python (2nd Edition, O'Reilly) - Same book on O'Reilly.
• Python Crash Course (3rd Edition) - Beginner-friendly projects (Eric Matthes).

Stack versions: This page was written for Python 3.14.0 (stable 3.14, maintenance 3.13), 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+.