Syntax

Rich can syntax highlight various programming languages with line numbers.

To syntax highlight code, construct a Syntax object and print it to the console. Here’s an example:

from rich.console import Console
from rich.syntax import Syntax

console = Console()
with open("syntax.py", "rt") as code_file:
    syntax = Syntax(code_file.read(), "python")
console.print(syntax)

You may also use the from_path() alternative constructor which will load the code from disk and auto-detect the file type. The example above could be re-written as follows:

from rich.console import Console
from rich.syntax import Syntax

console = Console()
syntax = Syntax.from_path("syntax.py")
console.print(syntax)

Line numbers

If you set line_numbers=True, Rich will render a column for line numbers:

syntax = Syntax.from_path("syntax.py", line_numbers=True)

Theme

The Syntax constructor (and from_path()) accept a theme attribute which should be the name of a Pygments theme. It may also be one of the special case theme names “ansi_dark” or “ansi_light” which will use the color theme configured by the terminal.

Background color

You can override the background color from the theme by supplying a background_color argument to the constructor. This should be a string in the same format a style definition accepts, e.g. “red”, “#ff0000”, “rgb(255,0,0)” etc. You may also set the special value “default” which will use the default background color set in the terminal.

Syntax CLI

You can use this class from the command line. Here’s how you would syntax highlight a file called “syntax.py”:

python -m rich.syntax syntax.py

For the full list of arguments, run the following:

python -m rich.syntax -h