Okay, so today I wanna talk about something I messed around with recently: rich heyman. Heard about it from some folks online, sounded kinda cool, so I figured, why not give it a shot?
First off, I had to figure out what the heck it actually was. Basically, it’s a way to make your command-line stuff look nicer, right? More readable, more colorful, easier to understand. My terminal usually looks like a black and white wasteland, so anything to spice it up is welcome.
So, the first thing I did was jump online and find the official docs. RTFM, as they say. Found their GitHub page, skimmed through the README. Seemed straightforward enough. The installation part was easy; just a simple pip install. Popped open my terminal and ran: pip install rich. Done. That was the first hurdle. Didn’t even trip.
Next, I started playing around with the basic examples. The docs had a few snippets showing how to print colored text, tables, progress bars, the whole shebang. I copied and pasted some of that into a Python script and ran it. And… yeah, it worked! Suddenly my terminal was bursting with color. It was like Dorothy stepping into Oz.
One thing I really wanted to try was the table feature. I’m always dealing with data that I want to present in a clear way, and just printing it out with print() is, well, ugly. So I looked up the table examples in the rich documentation. It took a bit of fiddling to figure out how to properly format the data, but once I got the hang of it, it was pretty sweet. I could define column headers, add rows of data, and even customize the look of the table with different styles.
I spent a good chunk of time just messing around with different features, trying to see what rich could do. The progress bar is pretty cool for long-running tasks. I wrote a dummy script that just slept for a few seconds at a time and updated the progress bar. It gave me a nice visual indication of how long the script was going to take.
Here’s a thing I tripped up on though: making it play nicely with my existing logging setup. I use the standard Python logging module, and I wanted to be able to use rich to format my log messages. Turns out, there’s a special handler you can use to integrate rich with logging. I had to dig around a bit to find the right documentation, but eventually I got it working. Now all my log messages are nicely colored and formatted in the terminal.
I then tried using the markdown support, which worked pretty well! I just threw some markdown strings at it and watched them render like magic.
So, yeah, that’s basically my experience with rich so far. It’s pretty slick. It definitely makes my terminal a more pleasant place to be. I’m still learning all the ins and outs, but I can already see myself using it a lot in my future projects.
- Installed rich via pip
- Experimented with colored text and basic formatting
- Created a table to display data
- Integrated rich with my logging setup
- Messed with progress bars
Definitely worth checking out if you’re looking to make your command-line tools a little more polished!
