Rich is a Python library for _rich_ text and advanced formatting to the terminal. Rich provided an easy to use API for colored text (up to 16.7million colors) with bold / italic / underline etc. and a number of more sophisticated formatting options, such as syntax / regex highlighting, emoji, tables, and markdown rendering.
Rich is also a _framework_ in that it implements a simple protocol which you may use to make custom objects renderable with advanced terminal formatting.
## Installing
Rich may be installed with pip or your favorite PyPi package manager.
The first step to using the rich console is to import and construct the `Console` object.
```python
from rich.console import Console
console = Console()
```
Most applications will require one `Console` instance. The easiest way to manage your console instance would be to construct an instance at the module level and import it where needed.
The Console object has a `print` method which has an intentionally similar interface to the builtin `print` function. Here's an example of use:
```
console.print("Hello", "World!")
```
As you might expect, this will print `"Hello World!"` to the terminal. The only difference from the `print` function is that the output is word-wrapped by default (Rich auto-detects the width of the terminal).
There are a few ways of adding color and style to your output. You can set a style for the entire output, by adding a `style` keyword argument. Here's an example:
That's fine for styling a line of text at a time. For more finely grained styling, Rich renders a special markup which is similar in syntax to [bbcode](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBCode). Here's an example:
Not that the CSS hex and RGB style of color lets you chose one of 16.7 million colors, but some terminals (notably OSX terminal) only support 256 colors. If Rich detects that only 256 colors are supported it will pick the closest color available.
Style attributes and colors may appear in any order, so `"bold underline magenta on yellow"` has the same effect as `"on yellow magenta underline bold"`.
Rich can render markdown, and does a reasonable job of translating the formatting to the terminal.
To render markdown import the `Markdown` class and construct it with a string containing markdown. Then print it to the console.
```python
from rich.console import Console
from rich.markdown import Markdown
console = Console()
with open("README.md") as readme:
markdown = Markdown(readme.read())
console.print(markdown)
```
This will produce output something like the following:
![markdown](./imgs/markdown.png)
## Syntax Highlighting
Rich uses the [pygments](https://pygments.org/) library to implement syntax highlighting. Usage is similar to rendering markdown; construct a `Syntax` object and print it to the console. Here's an example: