Ink VS rich

I've always wanted to build a CLI tool, and when I realized that you can build one using React with Ink, I converted my Python script into a CLI tool.

⚠️ Git for Windows Terminal is currently not supported, and the tool is limited to ink. We will look for alternatives later. Please use CMD, Vscode terminal's Git... terminal

There is a good solution for some of those cases - ink. With ink, I can implement text-based UI with knowledge of React, which is neat but there are still some caveats for my usages:

Looks cool, right? Building a similar UI in the terminal without any library would be quite hard, though, thanks to Ink it's almost as easy as building any frontend UI with React.

ink?

I'm writing a CLI with ink. Writing async code is important as to not block the rendering and respond to user input. I have a few loading animations that update every 100ms. Synchronous operations can make the animation hang for >500ms, making the animation choppy.

You get the comfort of using react components instead of fighting with HTML tables to make your emails look nice. I think it's awesome! It's analog to what ink[0] does with CLI outputs. Sure, you could write fancy CLI outputs in bash, but ink takes the pain out of it and makes it easy.

[0] https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink

Due to Node's asynchronous behavior, it makes Node great for long-running processes that make a lot of HTTP requests, database calls, and other async ops, like a web server or a REST API. However, if I am making a CLI tool for pretty much personal use only, with very minimal async operations, then blocking the event loop with a synchronous function that will resolve almost immediately will make no difference perceivable to a human brain or have any speed benefits that someone can actually observe (think `fs.readFileSync` or `require('dotenv') of 10 line config file, or a quick embedded db (sqlite) query with only ~100 records. I'm wondering what the best way to implement the database part of the app synchronous. I can read/write to JSON files but it would be tricky because the data is relational, and some complex joins and other data wrangling operations are required (complex to perform in JS but are easy to implement in a SQL statement). It's not important what the operations are, that's not the point of this post. This is mostly a personal project of interest: making this CLI tool completely avoiding any async operations/using no promises. I would like to use node tho, as I said this is just out of interest and I also want to experiment with several CLI libraries such as Ink or Cliffy.

There is an open issue [1] on GitHub to make it more modular and get rid of markdown and syntax highlighting but I have no hope for rich to get more minimal.

[1]: https://github.com/Textualize/rich/issues/2277

I hope he doesn't mind, but the creator of Rich and Textualize is a good guy, and Scottish: https://www.willmcgugan.com/about/

https://www.textualize.io/

https://github.com/Textualize/rich

They keep getting improved error messaging and this is one of my favorite features. But I'd love if we could get some real rich text. Idk if anyone else uses rich, but it has infected all my programs now. Not just to print with colors, but because it makes debugging so much easier. Not just print(f"{var=}") but the handler[0,1]. Color is so important to these types of things and so is formatting. Plus, the progress bars are nice and have almost completely replaced tqdm for me[2]. They're just easier and prettier.

[0] https://rich.readthedocs.io/en/stable/logging.html

[1] Try this example: https://github.com/Textualize/rich/blob/master/examples/exce...

[2] Side note: does anyone know how to get these properly working when using DDP with pytorch? I get flickering when using this and I think it is actually down to a pytorch issue and how they're handling their loggers and flushing the screen. I know pytorch doesn't want to depend on rich, but hey, pip uses rich so why shouldn't everyone?

colors.crumb extends Crumb with basic terminal styling functions and RGB, HEX, ANSI conversion functions. It is in the realm of JavaScript's chalk and Python's rich but slightly more functional 😉.

I am working on a new python project and one of the first things I added was https://github.com/Textualize/rich because of how easy it is to make things look good in the terminal.

I am not rewriting anything but I'd love to have a library like `rich` in Rust: https://github.com/textualize/rich

Add some cool-looking stuff to your output with rich.

You might consider taking inspiration from the rich module. In particular, I like how rich supports inline color theming which seems much more cumbersome in your framework, requiring the use of context managers as well as familiarity with how your framework structures color objects. Other than that though, I'm impressed!

Today I released coBib 4.0, my console bibliography manager written in Python, which now uses rich and textual to provide a cohesive and modern user experience in both its CLI and TUI.