Consider using rich to format output like exceptions

[phrrngtn]

I found my usage of Cmd2 to be enhanced by using rich to format exceptions.

class RichCmd(cmd2.Cmd):
    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__()
        self.console=Console()

[-]

    def pexcept(self, msg: Any, *, end: str = '\n', apply_style: bool = True) -> None:
        if self.debug and sys.exc_info() != (None,None,None):
            self.console.print_exception(show_locals=True)
        else:
            super().pexcept(msg,end=end,apply_style=apply_style)

[anselor]

This could easily be turned into a mixin class

[kmvanbrunt]

Printing exceptions with rich is a nice enhancement, but I'd rather not add rich as a requirement to use cmd2.

[anselor]

I'm going to look into doing a simple mixin for this or add an example, depending on what makes sense.

[anselor]

@phrrngtn I pushed up some initial structure of a rich mixin class for cmd2. Would you mind taking a look? My thought is the console.print() function can be called in poutput().

[phrrngtn]

I did not notice the feature branch so only just found out what you are referring to. I will exercise it. My most recent deep interaction with Cmd2 was in 2011 or thereabouts. I have just used it as-is since then.

[anselor]

It's a pretty minimal start that just took what you provided and puts it in a mixin. I've not used rich so I'm not really familiar with it but my thought is all of our print functions can be optionally shunted over to rich using this mixin class.

[tleonhardt]

I personally love rich and think it is fantastic and does a lot of things we have added features for in cmd2.

Right now I'm not sure we want to take a dependency on it, but we should consider doing so in the future.

@anselor Regardless, a mixin with an example of using it could be pretty awesome in the meantime.

[anselor]

@phrrngtn Hey, just checking in again. Did you get a chance to try out the rich mixin branch?

https://github.com/python-cmd2/cmd2/compare/master...1216-rich-print-mixin

Should be able to use it with something like:

class MyCmd(RichCmd, Cmd):
    ...


my_cmd = MyCmd()

[phrrngtn]

Sorry but I have done absolutely nothing on this! There is a heck of a lot of active development on Textual, a TUI framework by the people who did rich and I have been waiting for that to be released before I start digging into this (because one of my goals will be to run Cmd2 inside a widget in the TUI)

I feel a bit bad about raising this issue and then doing nothing about it but I hope I will be able to provide some answers as a by-product of the TUI work.

thanks for checking in. pjjH

[anselor]

No worries. I've also occasionally checked in on Textual's progress and I would love to be able to run cmd2 as the command interpreter inside of Textual Console UI. I have many project ideas if that can happen.

[anselor]

I think the discussion topic #1132 could also be enabled by integrating cmd2 with Textual.