Show HN: Rich-CLI – A CLI toolbox for highlighting, Markdown, JSON and rich text | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Rich-CLI – A CLI toolbox for highlighting, Markdown, JSON and rich text

github.com

126 pointswillm33 comments

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Hi HN,

This is a command line tool I’ve been working on for rendering various types of content in the terminal.

The core functionality is syntax highlighting with line numbers and indent guides.

It can render Markdown (commonmark), and does a reasonable job given the limitations of Terminal emulators.

It can render JSON with syntax highlighting.

Finally it can display general purpose rich text with “console markup” (like bbcode).

All of the above can have borders, styles, alignment applied independently.

This was written hastily, the majority of it came together over a single weekend. This is because it was built with Rich (a Python library which I am also the author of) which does the heavy lifting.

Currently you can install it as a Python package, but I plan on adding it to other channels so you can get it via your preferred package manager.

I know there are some excellent apps with equivalent features but I’m hoping this will become a versatile tool for developers (in particular). I’ll be adding more formats in the future.

Hope you find it interesting. I’ll be around for a while to answer questions.

Progress bar support would be really interesting - providing a neat way to add progress bars to shell scripts that do a bunch of work.

Not sure how to go about designing a CLI tool that adds progress bars to things that might involve executing other shell commands though - I guess "pv" is good prior art here.

This is good idea. Will investigate how to pipe data and display a progress bar at the same time.

tqdm already does this. It’s also a python package.

https://tqdm.github.io/docs/cli/

That's awesome - I've used tqdm as a Python library before (mainly within Jupyter notebooks) but I hadn't spotted that CLI version of it.

Can it render git diffs / git difftool?

Nope, but that would be a nice addition.

How do you add a new line? I tried

$ rich --print "\n hello world"

but it just returned

\n hello world

Also, where can I find the list of emoji and the correspondent ":description:"?

Bro, you are a Python GOD! I been just loving everything about Rich since I discovered it, and your other Python related tools have been fantastic as well. Permanent parts of my "Python toolbox", alongside "Click", "Flask", "Requests", and a bunch of other equally excellent such goodies. Thank you so very much for creating the things you do, (and for publishing them under FOSS licenses).

I remember when you first shared rich. It was so cool. It's been great watching your output increase so quickly Will. Thanks for all the hard work.

Does this support paging? I could see myself using this a lot for markdown files if it does.

And do you plan on supporting RST files?

Pager and RST support is coming :)

You da best.

Thanks Will for creating Rich. I'm also a big fan of Rich.

Are there any plans to make it easy to generate the Rich tables from the command line? Such as from CSV, TSV, JSON/L, or even SQLite databases?

This is going to be useful for many things in my teaching. I've just got my students to install Rich / textual for my python coding course as I've featured it as one of my Modules of the week. https://nccastaff.bournemouth.ac.uk/jmacey/msc/PipeLineAndTD... So this will come in handy. Great work.

Thanks. Hope your students also enjoy it!

One thing that may be nice is a pager mode. If you feed into more or less with a pipe you loose the syntax highlight.

You can add —force-terminal to avoid stripping ANSI codes. But you’re right, a built in pager would be nice.

I really like the potential this has to add more compelling output to simple shell scripts:

    #!/bin/bash
    rich "Starting process" --rule --rule-style "red"
    # ... do some stuff
    rich "Process [b]complete[/b]" -p -c --padding 1 --style "on blue"

I have been looking for something like this for a long time T.T

Couldn't you do something like this instead?

    echo "$(tput setaf 1)Starting process$(tput sgr0)"
    echo "  $(tput setaf 2)Process $(tput bold)complete$(tput sgr0)"

Looks similar to bat: https://github.com/sharkdp/bat

I love this tool! I'm currently experiencing issues with the pager in the gnome-terminal, but I'm guessing the build in pager is quite a new functionality so I'm patient. Thanks!

This is great as a general replacement for the `cat` command, especially with the `-n` argument to add line numbers.

[rich](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29945848) was recently discussed as well.

That's beautiful! Maybe adding tab completions would be useful? For example:

$ rich "hello world" -p -a <TAB> ...

Where "..." is all the possible values that can be taken in.

I think Click can do that. I’ll look in to it for the next version.

So you are using Click and not Typer?

Typer uses Click under the hood.

Yeah, that I knew: why Click over Typer? Greater control in creating the CLI?

That’s right. I would usually reach for Typer for CLIs. I chose Click because I wanted to extend the —-help and I wasn’t certain If Typer exposed the internals.

This looks great! I’d love something like this for the rust code I’ve been working on lately. Does anyone know of a similar library in rust?

This looks great! Congrats on shipping! My only nit is that it needs some paddings

What kind of paddings?

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