Get Rich or Die TTYing – Part 1: The REPL

This is the first post in a series where I explore everything you can (and perhaps sometimes shouldn’t) do with Rich – a Python library for styling terminal output. Oh, and everyone’s favourite mid-2000s rapper is along for the ride.

Today’s post focuses on the REPL.

“Go ahead, switch the style up.”

— 50 Cent, In da Club

Rich offers a number of quality of life improvements for Python’s interactive interpreter, or REPL. Namely, pretty printed – and stylable – output, along with a helpful tool for inspecting objects.

Syntax highlighted data structures

While Python 3.14 introduced syntax highlighting in the REPL, this only applies to input – output remains unstyled.

The rich.pretty class can be used prettify output by invoking the install() method. For example:

IPython users can skip the pretty import and install() invocation and run the following command instead.

In [1]: %load_ext rich

Note that the styling provided by rich.pretty doesn’t apply to print() calls. For this you need rich.print.

Pretty printing

Rich can overload Python’s native print() function with its own. Not only does this allow you to pretty print syntax-aware objects, you can also use Rich’s console markup to add colour, bold, italics, emoji and more to your print statements.

I’ll be covering console markup in depth in a future post, but for now I’ll leave you with this tasteful example.

Nicely formatted object inspection

The inspect() function prints a tidy summary of an object to the console. It’s useful for getting a quick overview of an object’s attributes (and methods, if needed).

Say you’re debugging and want to know more about gunit, an instance of the GUnit class. After importing inspect, a simple inspect(gunit, methods=True) should give you enough info to get started.

Like My Style?

If any of this bling appeals, I’d suggest adding Rich as a dev dependency to each of your projects.

uv add --dev rich

Then to ensure Rich is always imported in the REPL, create a ~/.startup.py file, e.g.:

from rich import pretty, print, inspect

pretty.install()

And point your PYTHONSTARTUP environment variable at it.

# in Bash
export PYTHONSTARTUP="$HOME/.startup.py"

# in Fish
set PYTHONSTARTUP "$HOME/.startup.py"

Conclusion

Hopefully this overview of Rich in the REPL has sparked your cursiosity and got you asking 21 Questions about what else the library can do. In future posts I’ll be exploring other features of Rich like logging, tables, live display, markdown and more. Until then, I’ll leave you Patiently Waiting.