Rich — Beautiful Formatting in the Python Terminal

What it is

Rich is a Python library for rendering beautiful text, tables, progress bars, markdown, syntax-highlighted code, and tracebacks in the terminal. It turns any Python CLI into a polished user experience with just a few lines of code. Rich is the rendering engine behind Textual (the TUI framework) and is used by pip for its progress display.

Rich is for Python developers building command-line tools, data pipelines, or scripts who want better terminal output without writing ANSI escape codes manually.

How it saves time or tokens

Without Rich, formatting terminal output requires manual ANSI escape sequences or third-party libraries like colorama for basic coloring. Rich provides a high-level API that handles color, layout, tables, trees, and progress bars through a single Console object.

For debugging, Rich's inspect() function and enhanced tracebacks show object attributes, source code context, and local variables in a readable format. This reduces the time spent deciphering stack traces and print-debugging.

How to use

1. Install Rich:

pip install rich

1. Use the Console for formatted output:

from rich.console import Console
from rich.table import Table

console = Console()
console.print('Hello, [bold magenta]World[/bold magenta]!')

table = Table(title='Dependencies')
table.add_column('Package', style='cyan')
table.add_column('Version', style='green')
table.add_row('rich', '13.7.0')
table.add_row('textual', '0.50.0')
console.print(table)

1. Run the built-in demo to see all features:

python -m rich

Example

Progress bar for a file download:

import time
from rich.progress import Progress

with Progress() as progress:
    task = progress.add_task('[cyan]Downloading...', total=100)
    while not progress.finished:
        progress.update(task, advance=1)
        time.sleep(0.05)

Syntax-highlighted code output:

from rich.syntax import Syntax
from rich.console import Console

console = Console()
code = '''def fibonacci(n):\n    a, b = 0, 1\n    for _ in range(n):\n        yield a\n        a, b = b, a + b'''
syntax = Syntax(code, 'python', theme='monokai', line_numbers=True)
console.print(syntax)

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Common pitfalls

• Rich output looks best in terminals that support 256 colors or truecolor. Pipe output to a file or a basic terminal and you get raw ANSI codes. Use Console(force_terminal=True) or Console(no_color=True) to control this.
• Rich's print() replaces Python's built-in print with markup parsing. If your text contains square brackets that are not markup, escape them with \[ or use console.print(text, highlight=False).
• Rich and logging: use RichHandler to integrate with Python's logging module. Do not mix console.print and logging.info without a handler, or output will interleave unpredictably.