Python’s Rich Library – a Tutorial

The Python rich library is a package for having clearer, styled, and colored output in the terminal. rich works across multiple operating systems – including Windows, Linux, and macOS. In this post, we’ll give an introduction to what it can do for you.

You can get started with rich by installing it with pip.

1	pip install rich

Once you have it installed, open up the command line and type in python. In order to get the additional functionality from rich, you’ll need to do one more step, which you can see below. Running this snippet will allow you to have styled / formatted code interactively. You’ll only need to do this once.

12	from rich import prettypretty.install()

Here’s a couple examples of automatic coloring for a list.

Creating “rich” progress bars

In a previous post, we talked about how to create progress bars with Python. rich can also create progress bars. Below, we import track from rich.progress. Similarly to tqdm, you can wrap an iterable with track to print out a progress bar as the loop completes each iteration.

1234	from rich.progress import track for num in track(range(100)):print(num * 2)

Also, like tqdm, progress bars can be created for list and dictionary comprehensions, too! In the snippet below, we use rich to track the download progress of a collection of stocks (see more on scraping stock prices here).

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import yahoo_fin.stock_info as si tickers = si.tickers_dow() dow_prices = {ticker : si.get_data(ticker) for ticker in track(tickers)}

Word wrapping and font colors

rich can apply word wrapping to printed text so that it fits within the terminal width. To take advantage of this feature, you need to create a Console object.

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from rich.console import Console c = Console() c.print("testing word wrap")

You can also add styling to the printed text, such as modifying the font color. To see the possible colors, check out this link.

Visit TheAutomatic.net for additional Python code such as how to create formatted tables and inspect Python objects with rich:
http://theautomatic.net/2021/01/05/pythons-rich-library-a-tutorial/.