Request for collaboration

[kotfu]

Hey, I'm one of the maintainers of cmd2, and we are exploring ways we can either incorporate rich into our library as a dependency, and/or make it easier for users of cmd2 to utilize rich in their own applications. Our issue capturing the discussion so far is at python-cmd2/cmd2#1251.

In my early exploration of how best to do this in cmd2, I found this excellent project, which solves an important part of the problem for us. I have identified an initial list of changes/improvements to rich-argparse which would really benefit our work. Here's a brief list:

• we would like more styles and more granular styles for different elements in the help/usage output
• the current implementation creates it's own rich.console objects, we would be interested in exploring changes to rich-argparse which could make it easier for a user/subclasser of RichHelpFormatter() to provide their own rich.console object (which I get will be tricky or maybe impossible since argparse.ArgumentParser instantiates this class.
• the current implementation of RichHelpFormatter.format_help() uses rich.console.capture which seems to create some formatting problems if you have "embedded" rich.console objects, ie one console object processing the output of format_help() while another console is capturing inside of format_help(). Not sure yet if this is a rich-argparse problem or a rich problem.

If you are open to collaboration/discussion/pull requests of our changes/enhancements, we would love to work with you. That would be our preferred approach if that works for you. If not, that's fine too, the MIT license for this project is compatible with the cmd2 license and we could fork your work to make it work better for our use case.

Are you open to collaboration, discussion, and pull requests from me?

[hamdanal]

Hi, I'd be happy to make changes that'll make it easier for you to use rich_argparse as long as they fit into this project and they don't break current users. I don't know what cmd2 does exactly or how it uses rich so please answer my questions.

• we would like more styles and more granular styles for different elements in the help/usage output

Could you clarify what styles are you thinking of? perhaps give an example.

• the current implementation creates it's own rich.console objects, we would be interested in exploring changes to rich-argparse which could make it easier for a user/subclasser of RichHelpFormatter() to provide their own rich.console object (which I get will be tricky or maybe impossible since argparse.ArgumentParser instantiates this class.

Could you please explain the use case for a custom console? The console in RichHelpFormatter is only used to produce the correct string output of the help text. The only reason a console is used is because rich objects do not offer an interface to get their raw text as pointed out by rich creator here Textualize/rich#1179 (comment). Users are not supposed to print anything using this console that is not produced by the formatter.

• the current implementation of RichHelpFormatter.format_help() uses rich.console.capture which seems to create some formatting problems if you have "embedded" rich.console objects, ie one console object processing the output of format_help() while another console is capturing inside of format_help(). Not sure yet if this is a rich-argparse problem or a rich problem.

The output of RichHelpFormatter.format_help is a raw string with ansi codes produced by console.print. It is supposed to be written as is to the output file (in the argparse case this is stdout). I am not sure how exactly you are using this output or why you'll want to print it with a console but if you want to get a "rich object" that you can manipulate from the help output, you can use Text.from_ansi to do that.

Are you open to collaboration, discussion, and pull requests from me?

Sure thing. You are more that welcome to discuss or contribute pull requests. I cannot promise that I can accept all your requests so a discussion before you spend time implementing a PR would be appreciated.

[kotfu]

That all sounds great. I'll open a new issue for each proposal for discussion and provide more detail. You can use that discussion to determine if the proposal fits with your vision for the project and if so, I'm happy to work on pull requests which you can then review to ensure the implementation is satisfactory, or if you'd like changes to be made before merging (or rejecting all together, as you see fit).

[hamdanal]

@kotfu after #54 and #60, I feel there is something about your use case that I don't understand yet. Could you please state here why exactly you need to print the text produced by RichHelpFormatter.format_help using a bare console.print call instead of the other valid methods that I suggested in those issues? I would like to understand more how you are using this library so that I can help you find a proper solution. Perhaps you could include a full example of how your program is constructed and how it integrates rich-argparse.