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

https://github.com/Textualize/rich-cli

by willm • 4 years ago

126 33 4 years ago

github.com

willm9• 4 years ago

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.

simonw4• 4 years ago

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.

willm9• 4 years ago

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

pletnes2• 4 years ago

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

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

pletnes2• 4 years ago

Can it render git diffs / git difftool?

willm9• 4 years ago

Nope, but that would be a nice addition.

baggiponte5• 4 years ago

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:"?

blooalien• 4 years ago

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).

stonecharioteer2• 4 years ago

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?

willm9• 4 years ago

Pager and RST support is coming :)

leonim• 4 years ago

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?

mr-karan• 4 years ago

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

simonw4• 4 years ago

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"

baggiponte5• 4 years ago

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

tinalumfoil• 4 years ago

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)"

patrick91• 4 years ago

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

willm9• 4 years ago

What kind of paddings?

jpm482• 4 years ago

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.

willm9• 4 years ago

Thanks. Hope your students also enjoy it!

jpm482• 4 years ago

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.

amanzi• 4 years ago

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

chme• 4 years ago

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

josephg• 4 years ago

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?

baggiponte5• 4 years ago

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.

willm9• 4 years ago

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

baggiponte5• 4 years ago

So you are using Click and not Typer?

zsolt_terek• 4 years ago

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!

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

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