The Python Rich Package: Unleash the Power of Console Text

Python’s Rich package is a tool kit that helps you generate beautifully formatted and highlighted text in the console. More broadly, it allows you to build an attractive text-based user interface (TUI).

Why would you choose a TUI over a graphical user interface, or GUI? Sometimes a text display feels more appropriate. Why use a full-blown GUI for a simple application, when an elegant text interface will do? It can be refreshing to work with plain text. Text works in almost any hardware environment, even on an SSH terminal or a single-board computer display. And many applications don’t need the complexity of a full graphical windowing system.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how Rich can help you:

• Enhance the user interface of command-line tools
• Improve the readability of console output
• Create attractive dashboard displays for real-time tabular data
• Generate well-formatted reports

Will McGugan, the author of Rich, has also developed the Textual package. Whereas Rich is a rich-text tool kit, Textual is a full application framework built on Rich. It provides application base classes, an event-driven architecture, and more.

There’s a lot you can do with Rich on its own, and its support for engaging, dynamic displays may well be sufficient for your app. By following this tutorial, you’ll experiment with many of the cool features of Rich, and you’ll finish up by using your skills to build a dynamically scrolling tabular display of crypto prices:

To fully understand Rich’s syntax for animations, you should have a good grasp of context managers. But if you’re a bit rusty, don’t worry! You’ll get a quick refresher in this tutorial.

PS> python -m venv venv
PS> venv\Scripts\activate
(venv) PS> python -m pip install rich[jupyter]

$ python -m venv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate
(venv) $ python -m pip install