styled: Style your terminal with ease!

Getting Started

To get it from PyPI use

pip install styled

It's best to do this in a virtual environment.

# anaconda/miniconda
conda create -n styled python
source activate styled
pip install styled

# virtualenv
virtualenv /path/to/env/styled -p /path/to/python
source /path/to/envs/styled/bin/activate
pip install styled

There are two ways to use styled:

• interactively using the styled CLI which has three commands: try, demo and version; type styled to read the instructions;
• programmatically through the Styled class.

Concepts

To style a string, you need to delimit the portion to be styled with double brackets [[ ... ]] then make sure that the following three (3) conditions hold:

• separate the text from the styles with a pipe (|),
• quote the text part with either a pair of single ('...') or double ("...") quotes, then
• separate each style with a colon (:)

There are three (3) types of styles:

• text styling such as bold, blink, underlined etc.
• foreground colours, such as fg-red,
• background colours, such as bg-blue.

If you want to style an extended piece of text you can use the special style marker no-end signaling that current style will not be interrupted for as long as possible. This can be useful if you want to style a long stretch of text e.g. a paragraph. Use the special marker yes-end to terminate a no-end marker.

Interactive Use

The fastest way to get started is to use the try command:

Trying out a formatted string.

You can reference the available styles using the demo command, which by default shows colours.

Colour Palette

Use demo formats to view formatting options.

Formatting Options

Programmatic Use

To use styled programmatically, use the Styled class as follows:

from styled import Styled
s = Styled("We are [[ 'bold'|bold ]] men!")
print(s)

You can perform string formatting directly in the constructor.

from styled import Styled
s = Styled("There were up to [[ '{}'|bold:fg-red ]] people who handed over themselves to the \
[[ '{police}'|fg-black:bg-red:bold ]].", 24, police='policia')
print(s)

from styled import Styled
s = Styled("There were up to [[ '{}'|bold:fg-red:no-end ]] people who handed over themselves to the \
[[ '{police}'|fg-black:bg-red:bold ]].", 24, police='policia')
print(s)

The above example will have all the text until the next marker affected by the red foreground styling. You can also manually enforce an end marker by using yes-end as a style. By default, all style markers will terminate on the text to be styled. So, for example

from styled import Styled
# an example of a terminating end marker
s = Styled("There were up to [[ '{}'|bold:fg-red:no-end ]] people who handed over themselves [[ ''|yes-end ]] to the \
[[ '{police}'|fg-black:bg-red:bold ]].", 24, police='policia')
print(s)

will suspend red foreground at the end of the word 'themselves'.

You can only have one foreground and one background colour. Ignoring this produces a StyleError

from styled import Styled
s = Styled("There were up to [[ '{}'|bold:fg-red:fg-blue ]] people who handed over themselves to the [[ '{police}'|fg-black:bg-red:bold ]].", 24, police='policia')

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/pkorir/miniconda2/envs/styled/lib/python2.7/site-packages/IPython/core/interactiveshell.py", line 2878, in run_code
    exec(code_obj, self.user_global_ns, self.user_ns)
  File "<ipython-input-3-0993b680f88b>", line 1, in <module>
    s = Styled("There were up to [[ '{}'|bold:fg-red:fg-blue ]] people who handed over themselves to the [[ '{police}'|fg-black:bg-red:bold ]].", 24, police='policia')
  File "/Users/pkorir/PycharmProjects/styled/styled/styled.py", line 55, in __init__
    self._validate(self._tokens)
  File "/Users/pkorir/PycharmProjects/styled/styled/styled.py", line 156, in _validate
    raise StyleError("Multiple foreground styles for text '{}': {}".format(text, ', '.join(styles)))
StyleError: Multiple foreground styles for text '24': bold, fg-red, fg-blue

Inputting an invalid style also raises a StyleError

from styled import Styled
s = Styled("This just can't just [[ 'go'|underline ]] on forever! ")

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/pkorir/miniconda2/envs/styled/lib/python2.7/site-packages/IPython/core/interactiveshell.py", line 2878, in run_code
    exec(code_obj, self.user_global_ns, self.user_ns)
  File "<ipython-input-4-528d6d2ac4f4>", line 1, in <module>
    s = Styled("This just can't just [[ 'go'|underline ]] on forever! ")
  File "/Users/pkorir/PycharmProjects/styled/styled/styled.py", line 59, in __init__
    self._styled = self._transform(self._plain, self._cleaned_tokens)
  File "/Users/pkorir/PycharmProjects/styled/styled/styled.py", line 99, in _transform
    styled += plain[i:start] + self.transform(token)
  File "/Users/pkorir/PycharmProjects/styled/styled/styled.py", line 87, in transform
    raise StyleError("Unknown style '{}'".format(style_))
StyleError: Unknown style 'underline'

(In case you're wondering, it should have been underlined not underline.)

Concatenation

Concatenating a normal string and a Styled string produces a Styled string, which is a subclass of string. Internally, though, everything is a Unicode string.

from styled import Styled
s = Styled("This just can't just [[ 'go'|underlined ]] on forever! ")
u = "She shouted back!"
print(type(s + u))
# <class 'styled.styled.Styled'>
print(type(u + s))
# <class 'styled.styled.Styled'>
s += "Gloria!"
print(type(s))
# <class 'styled.styled.Styled'>

Validation

The process of generating the output involves some validation - to check that styles are sane. At present, only multiple fore- and background colours are checked. This will be expanded as needed.

Cleaning Styles

In addition to validation, styles are cleaned. Cleaning ensures that the final set of styles is non-redundant.

from styled import Styled
s = Styled("It takes enormous [[ 'courage'|bold:bold:bold ]] to admit that you're wrong.")
print(s._tokens)
# [(19, 49, 'courage', ['bold', 'bold', 'bold'])]
print(s._cleaned_tokens)
# [(19, 49, 'courage', ['bold'])]

Backstory

Welcome to styled, a simple Python package that makes a breeze of writing beautiful text to the terminal. The main innovation behind styled is the dead-simple user interface which does away with the user's need to know anything other than the style names. Behind the scenes styled handles everything to keep your styles consistent and redundant and informing you when you have made formatting errors.

styled was borne out of the frustration encountered in using other packages which muddle the boundary between user-space and design-space. The user should be free to be a user, and it is the designer's job to hide the implementation behind a simple user interface that facilitates the user's task. This is what I've tried to do. If I have failed to live up to this please let me know. I'm sure together we can come up with something better.

Aspirations?

When I grow up I want to have my own Python string declaration like so:

# hey! I'm a styled string
s = s"You have to [[ 'believe'|fg-red ]] it to [[ 'see'|fg-green ]] it!"

Special Thanks

To the following people

• Dimitris Zlatanidis (for the inspiration and resources in his package colored available at https://gitlab.com/dslackw/colored)
• Cesare Catavitello (for being the first user)