Getting Started with Clint

clint (Command Line INterface Tools) is a Python package providing a set of awesome tools for developing command line applications. It has support for printing in color, indented printing, column printer and a number of other features. Let’s get started.

Installing Clint

clint is installed via pip. On Fedora Linux, you would do sudo pip-python install clint.

Printing in color

We will explore clint's feature to print in color in this section. Consider the following example:

>>> from clint.textui import puts, colored
>>> puts(colored.red('Text in Red'))
Text in Red

Note that the above text is in red. Likewise, you can use the other colors. Consider the next script:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# Print text in all colors

from clint.textui import colored, puts

if __name__ == '__main__':
   for color in colored.COLORS:
            puts(getattr(colored,color)('Text in {0:s}'.format(color.upper()))

This script produces the following output:

Text in RED
Text in GREEN
Text in YELLOW
Text in BLUE
Text in BLACK
Text in MAGENTA
Text in CYAN
Text in WHITE

Indented printing

Let’s say you want to print indented text. Its simple with clint:

Column printing

Progress bar functionality

Prompting

Argument Parsing

Working with Pipes

Configuration files