rich — Beautiful Terminal Output#

What it is#

Rich is a Python library for rich text and beautiful formatting in the terminal. It provides:

• Styled and colored print() with markup
• Tables, panels, and trees
• Syntax-highlighted code blocks
• Progress bars (with ETA and throughput)
• Live-updating displays (dashboards, spinners)
• Tracebacks with local variable values

It also ships a standalone CLI tool (rich) for piping colored output from the shell.

[!NOTE] Output blocks below show ANSI-stripped plain text. In your actual terminal, Rich renders in full color with box-drawing characters and smooth animations.

Install#

pip install rich           # Python library
pip install rich-cli       # optional standalone CLI tool

Styled print with markup#

from rich import print

print("[bold green]Success![/bold green] Task completed in [cyan]0.42s[/cyan].")
print("[red]Error:[/red] File not found: [italic yellow]config.yaml[/italic yellow]")
print("[bold]Numbers:[/bold] [blue]42[/blue], [magenta]3.14[/magenta], [white on red] WARNING [/white on red]")

Output:

Success! Task completed in 0.42s.
Error: File not found: config.yaml
Numbers: 42, 3.14,  WARNING 

[!NOTE] In the terminal, “Success!” appears bold green, “0.42s” in cyan, “Error:” in red, and ” WARNING ” as white text on a red background.

Console — control over output stream#

from rich.console import Console

console = Console()
console.print("Hello from Rich!", style="bold magenta")
console.print("Rendered to stderr:", style="dim", end="\n", highlight=False)
console.rule("[bold]Section Break[/bold]")
console.log("This is a log message — includes timestamp and caller")

Output:

Hello from Rich!
Rendered to stderr:
──────────────────────────── Section Break ────────────────────────────
[14:30:01] This is a log message — includes timestamp and caller      rich_demo.py:7

Tables#

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

console = Console()

table = Table(title="Python Package Summary", show_lines=True)
table.add_column("Package", style="cyan", no_wrap=True)
table.add_column("Purpose", style="white")
table.add_column("Install", style="green")

table.add_row("requests", "HTTP client",       "pip install requests")
table.add_row("pandas",   "DataFrames",         "pip install pandas")
table.add_row("fastapi",  "ASGI web framework", "pip install fastapi")
table.add_row("pytest",   "Testing framework",  "pip install pytest")
table.add_row("ruff",     "Linter + formatter", "pip install ruff")

console.print(table)

Output:

              Python Package Summary               
┌──────────┬───────────────────┬──────────────────────┐
│ Package  │ Purpose           │ Install              │
├──────────┼───────────────────┼──────────────────────┤
│ requests │ HTTP client       │ pip install requests │
│ pandas   │ DataFrames        │ pip install pandas   │
│ fastapi  │ ASGI web framework│ pip install fastapi  │
│ pytest   │ Testing framework │ pip install pytest   │
│ ruff     │ Linter + formatter│ pip install ruff     │
└──────────┴───────────────────┴──────────────────────┘

Progress bar#

import time
from rich.progress import Progress, SpinnerColumn, TimeElapsedColumn

items = list(range(20))

with Progress(
    SpinnerColumn(),
    "[progress.description]{task.description}",
    "[progress.percentage]{task.percentage:>3.0f}%",
    TimeElapsedColumn(),
) as progress:
    task = progress.add_task("Processing items...", total=len(items))
    for item in items:
        time.sleep(0.05)  # simulate work
        progress.advance(task)

print("Done!")

Output:

⠸ Processing items... 100%  0:00:01
Done!

[!NOTE] During execution the progress bar animates with a spinner, live percentage, and elapsed time. The final state shows 100%.

Track (simple progress)#

For simple iterables, rich.progress.track is the quickest way:

import time
from rich.progress import track

results = []
for i in track(range(10), description="Computing..."):
    time.sleep(0.1)
    results.append(i * i)

print(results)

Output:

Computing... ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 100% 0:00:01
[0, 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81]

Syntax highlighting#

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

console = Console()

code = '''
def fibonacci(n: int) -> int:
    if n < 2:
        return n
    return fibonacci(n - 1) + fibonacci(n - 2)

print(fibonacci(10))
'''

syntax = Syntax(code.strip(), "python", theme="monokai", line_numbers=True)
console.print(syntax)

Output:

  1 def fibonacci(n: int) -> int:
  2     if n < 2:
  3         return n
  4     return fibonacci(n - 1) + fibonacci(n - 2)
  5 
  6 print(fibonacci(10))

[!NOTE] In the terminal, keywords appear in purple, strings in yellow, and line numbers are dimmed — Monokai theme colors.

Live updating display#

import time
from rich.console import Console
from rich.live import Live
from rich.table import Table

console = Console()

def make_table(step: int) -> Table:
    table = Table(title=f"Live Update — step {step}")
    table.add_column("Metric")
    table.add_column("Value", style="cyan")
    table.add_row("Step",     str(step))
    table.add_row("Progress", f"{step * 10}%")
    table.add_row("Rate",     f"{step * 1.7:.1f} items/s")
    return table

with Live(make_table(0), refresh_per_second=4) as live:
    for i in range(1, 11):
        time.sleep(0.3)
        live.update(make_table(i))

console.print("[bold green]Finished![/bold green]")

Output (final frame):

     Live Update — step 10     
┌──────────┬────────────────┐
│ Metric   │ Value          │
├──────────┼────────────────┤
│ Step     │ 10             │
│ Progress │ 100%           │
│ Rate     │ 17.0 items/s   │
└──────────┴────────────────┘
Finished!

Pretty-print data structures#

from rich import inspect, pretty
from rich.console import Console

console = Console()

data = {
    "users": [
        {"id": 1, "name": "Alice", "roles": ["admin", "user"]},
        {"id": 2, "name": "Bob",   "roles": ["user"]},
    ],
    "total": 2,
}
console.print(data)

Output:

{
    'users': [
        {'id': 1, 'name': 'Alice', 'roles': ['admin', 'user']},
        {'id': 2, 'name': 'Bob', 'roles': ['user']}
    ],
    'total': 2
}

Rich tracebacks#

from rich.traceback import install
install(show_locals=True)  # call once at app startup

# Now all unhandled exceptions produce rich tracebacks
# with syntax-highlighted frames and local variable values
raise ValueError("something went wrong")

Output:

╭─────────────────── Traceback (most recent call last) ───────────────────╮
│ demo.py:5 in <module>                                                    │
│                                                                          │
│   3 install(show_locals=True)                                            │
│   4                                                                      │
│ ❱ 5 raise ValueError("something went wrong")                            │
│                                                                          │
╰──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯
ValueError: something went wrong

rich-cli — shell command#

The rich CLI tool lets you pipe and render content from the shell:

# Render markdown in the terminal
rich README.md

# Syntax-highlight a Python file
rich main.py --syntax python

# Pretty-print JSON
cat data.json | rich - --json

# Render a CSV as a table
rich data.csv

Output (markdown rendering):

                       My Project                        
                                                         
  A short description of the project.                   
                                                         
  Usage                                                  
  ━━━━━                                                  
                                                         
  ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────┐  
  │ $ python main.py --help                          │  
  └──────────────────────────────────────────────────┘  

Markup reference#