explaingit

textualize/rich

56,387PythonAudience · developerComplexity · 2/5MaintainedLicenseSetup · easy

TLDR

Python library that adds color, tables, progress bars, and syntax highlighting to terminal output with minimal code.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((Rich))
    What it does
      Colored text markup
      Tables and layouts
      Progress bars
      Syntax highlighting
    Features
      Markdown rendering
      Exception tracebacks
      Object inspection
      Auto-adapts terminals
    Use cases
      CLI tools
      Progress reporting
      Config display
      Debugging output
    Tech stack
      Python 3
      pip installable
      No dependencies
      Cross-platform

Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Build a CLI tool that displays configuration data or API responses in formatted tables with colors.

USE CASE 2

Add animated progress bars to long-running scripts so users see real-time task completion.

USE CASE 3

Display syntax-highlighted code snippets or logs in your terminal application for easier reading.

USE CASE 4

Improve exception tracebacks in your scripts to show local variable values at each stack frame.

Tech stack

Python 3pip

Getting it running

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 5min
Use freely for any purpose, including commercial use, as long as you keep the copyright notice.

In plain English

Rich is a Python library that makes terminal output beautiful and informative. The default terminal experience in Python, plain white text, no structure, is hard to read for complex data, long logs, or progress-heavy scripts. Rich solves this by giving your terminal programs color, layout, and formatting with minimal extra code. The way it works is straightforward: Rich provides a drop-in replacement for Python's built-in print function that accepts markup tags similar to HTML. Writing [bold red]warning[/bold red] renders that word in bold red in the terminal. Beyond simple text styling, Rich can render formatted tables where rows and columns line up cleanly, animated progress bars that update in place to show how much of a long task is done, syntax-highlighted source code with proper color coding for the language, Markdown documents rendered with headings and emphasis, and exception tracebacks that display the local variable values at each stack frame so debugging is much easier. It also includes an inspect function that pretty-prints any Python object showing its attributes and methods in a structured way. Rich adapts to the terminal's capabilities: it renders 24-bit color where available, falls back gracefully on older terminals, and also works in Jupyter notebooks without any configuration. It supports Windows, macOS, and Linux. You would use Rich any time you are building a command-line tool and want the output to be readable, for progress reporting during a long computation, for printing configuration data or API responses in a structured way, for improving developer tools and scripts that other people will run, or for making your own debugging output easier to scan. The tech stack is pure Python 3, installable via pip, with no external dependencies.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Show me how to use Rich to print a colored table of data in my Python script with bold headers.
Prompt 2
How do I add an animated progress bar to a loop in Rich that updates as the task completes?
Prompt 3
Can you help me use Rich's syntax highlighting to display JSON or Python code in my CLI tool?
Prompt 4
How do I use Rich's inspect function to pretty-print a Python object with all its attributes?
Prompt 5
Show me how to render Markdown with Rich in a terminal, including headings and emphasis.
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Generated 2026-05-18 · Model: sonnet-4-6 · Verify against the repo before relying on details.