Comparison of Click and rich-click¶

rich-click is a shim around Click, meaning its API is designed to mirror the Click API and intercept some of the calls to slightly different functions.

Everything available via import click is also available via import rich_click as click.

rich-click is designed to keep the additional API surface introduced on top of Click as lightweight as possible.

Click features that rich-click overrides¶

The only things that rich-click explicitly overrides in the high-level API are the decorators:

click.command()
click.group()

The only change to these decorators is that by default, their cls= parameters point to the rich-click implementations of Command (i.e. RichCommand) and Group (i.e. RichGroup).

Note

There is also a thin wrapper around pass_context() to cast the click.Context type in the function signature to click.RichContext to assist with static type-checking with MyPy. Aside from different typing, there are no substantive changes to the pass_context() decorator.

Click features that rich-click does not override¶

Base Click command classes¶

You can still access the base Click classes by their original names:

from rich_click import Command, Group, Context

The above are the same as importing from click.

rich-click's subclasses all have the word Rich in front of them!

from rich_click import RichCommand, RichGroup, RichContext

Echo and interactive elements¶

rich-click deliberately does not enrich certain Click features:

click.echo()
click.echo_via_pager()
click.confirm()
click.prompt()

You are free to use these functions and they are available via import rich_click as click, but Rich's markup will not work with these functions because these functions are just the base Click implementations, without any changes.

This is a deliberate decision that we are unlikely to change in the future. We do not want to maintain a more spread-out API surface, and we encourage users to become comfortable using Rich directly; it's a great library and it's worth learning a little bit about it! If you'd like Rich markup for your echos and interactive elements, then you can:

Click Function	Rich Replacement	Rich Documentation
`click.echo()`	`rich.print()`	Quick start
`click.echo_via_pager()`	`rich.Console().pager()`	Console
`click.confirm()`	`rich.prompt.Confirm.ask()`	Prompt
`click.prompt()`	`rich.prompt.Prompt.ask()`	Prompt

Below is a side-by-side comparison of Click and Rich implementations of echos and interactive elements in rich-click:

ClickRich

import rich_click as click

@click.command("greet")
def greet():
    name = click.prompt(click.style("What is your name?", fg="blue"))

    if not click.confirm(click.style("Are you sure?", fg="blue")):
        click.echo(click.style("Aborting", fg="red"))
        return

    click.echo(click.style(f"Hello, {name}!", fg="green"))

if __name__ == "__main__":
    greet()

import rich_click as click
import rich
from rich.prompt import Confirm, Prompt

@click.command("greet")
def greet():
    name = Prompt.ask("[blue]What is your name?[/]")

    if not Confirm.ask("[blue]Are you sure?[/]"):
        rich.print("[red]Aborting[/]")
        return

    rich.print(f"[green]Hello, {name}![/]")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    greet()

Additional rich-click features¶

rich-click has a configuration object, RichHelpConfiguration(), that allows for control over how rich-click help text renders, so you are not just locked into the defaults. More information about this is described in the Configuration docs.
rich-click comes with a CLI tool that allows you to convert regular Click CLIs into rich-click CLIs, and also lets you render your rich-click CLI help text as HTML and SVG. More information about this is described in the rich-click CLI docs.