What's the best way to customize the layout of the "options" panel?

[travishathaway]

First Check

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Commit to Help

• I commit to help with one of those options 👆

Example Code

"""
Module containing customization for typer
"""
import inspect
from typing import Any

import click
from rich import box
from rich.console import Console, RenderableType
from rich.highlighter import RegexHighlighter
from rich.panel import Panel
from rich.table import Table
from rich.text import Text
from typer import rich_utils
from typer.core import TyperCommand


def _print_panel_options(
    name: str,
    params: list[click.Option] | list[click.Argument],
    ctx: click.Context,
    markup_mode: rich_utils.MarkupMode,
    console: Console,
):
    """
    Custom implementation of `typer.rich_utils._print_panel_options`
    """
    # Custom layout code would go here....

class TyperCommandOverride(TyperCommand):
    def format_help(self, ctx: click.Context, formatter: click.HelpFormatter):
        """Custom override of help formatting"""
        return rich_utils.rich_format_help(
            obj=self,
            ctx=ctx,
            markup_mode=self.rich_markup_mode,
            print_options_panel_func=_print_panel_options,  # New argument
        )

Description

This is more of a feature request than a question. I am writing a CLI with typer, and I would like to completely override the display of command line options and arguments on the help pages. I simply do not like the table layout and would like to switch to a layout that looks more like the following:

# This is a snippet from `pixi add --help` page. See here for more information on pixi: https://pixi.sh
# What's not shown here is that this help page also has colors and text formatting.

Global Options:
      --manifest-path <MANIFEST_PATH>
          The path to `pixi.toml`, `pyproject.toml`, or the workspace directory

  -h, --help
          Display help information

  -v, --verbose...
          Increase logging verbosity (-v for warnings, -vv for info, -vvv for debug, -vvvv for trace)

  -q, --quiet...
          Decrease logging verbosity (quiet mode)

      --color <COLOR>
          Whether the log needs to be colored
          
          [env: PIXI_COLOR=]
          [default: auto]
          [possible values: always, never, auto]

      --no-progress
          Hide all progress bars, always turned on if stderr is not a terminal
          
          [env: PIXI_NO_PROGRESS=]

I know I could simply just copy typer.rich_utils to my project and simply override the entire rich_format_help function, but that seems a little overkill for what I want and maintaining this copied version of the module would also become difficult as the project progresses.

Possible solution

I think a better solution would be adding the ability to simply override the functions that render the panel (

typer/typer/rich_utils.py

Line 348 in b0e6be2

def _print_options_panel(

). I think we could do this pretty easily if the we added new arguments to the rich_format_help function.

Drawbacks

Now that we've exposed this functions and encouraged them to be customized, we'll need to be extra careful about changing them in the future, but I think this drawback is worth the added flexibility.

Alternatives

On top of the alternative I mentioned above (simply overriding the entire rich_format_help function), we could also pursue a plugin architecture for customizing these parts of typer. For this, we could use something like the pluggy library. I'm a core maintainer of the conda package manager, and we've had quite a bit of success implementing and using pluggy over the years for this purpose.

Looking forward to hearing feedback from the community on this and whether anyone has ever wanted the same thing from typer.

Operating System

Linux, Windows, macOS

Operating System Details

No response

Typer Version

0.20.0

Python Version

=3.10

Additional Context

Here's a link to a pull request that would add this new functionality to typer:

• Provide override for _print_options_panel and _print_commands_panel #1421

[travishathaway]

Here's a screenshot of how I'd like to format the help pages:

I guess another option would be to just add this directly to typer and make it configurable via a variable like rich_help_layout with options being either table or block (not sure block is the best choice here though 😅).

Anyways, hope this makes more sense now. Looking forward to anyone's feedback on this.

[dwreeves]

Self-plug: rich-click has a Typer integration. It cannot do exactly what you want, but it still provides a lot of powerful options for customization that might be of interest to you.

Typer integration docs here: https://ewels.github.io/rich-click/latest/documentation/typer_support/