Is There a Way to Disable Automatic Line Breaks in Rich When Printing Long Lines?

[Erimus-Koo]

I really like the auto-coloring feature when printing with Rich. However, one thing has been bothering me: Rich automatically inserts line breaks based on the window size.

For example, when displaying a long file path, most modern terminals allow you to click to open the path or file directly. But after Rich adds extra spaces or line breaks, this no longer works. Similarly, if I want to copy a long path, or copy a piece of data like a list or dict, the formatting is incorrect due to the inserted line breaks or spaces.

Right now, I’ve worked around this by overriding print behavior, but it's a bit complicated. I’d like to know: is there an official parameter that controls whether Rich adds these extra line breaks?

[liowald]

Yes — use Console.print(..., soft_wrap=True) for a string:

from rich.console import Console

console = Console()
console.print("/some/very/long/path/to/a/file.txt", soft_wrap=True, markup=False)

soft_wrap=True stops Rich from inserting width-based line breaks and disables cropping. Highlighting remains enabled; markup=False keeps literal square brackets in a path from being interpreted as style tags.

For your list/dict case, use console.out():

console.out({"paths": ["/some/long/path", "/another/path"]}, highlight=True)

That uses the object's string representation without Rich's pretty-print layout, word wrapping, or markup, while retaining highlighting.

The terminal can still wrap the display visually; this removes the extra line breaks emitted by Rich. Link detection and copying across visual wraps remain terminal-dependent.

Checked both examples on Rich 15.0.0 with a 20-column console captured to StringIO: after removing ANSI styling, the output was the original string/object representation plus one final newline. ANSI highlighting was retained.

[tayfuryldz]

There is an official switch for the string/path case: Console.print(..., soft_wrap=True). In current Rich, soft_wrap=True sets no_wrap=True and overflow="ignore", so Rich does not insert width-based wrapping/cropping into the rendered text.

For example:

console.print(long_path, soft_wrap=True, markup=False)

markup=False is useful for literal paths containing square brackets. The terminal itself may still visually wrap a line at the window edge, but that is different from Rich inserting layout breaks; copying/link detection then depends on the terminal.

For arbitrary objects such as lists/dicts, console.out(obj, highlight=True) is also worth considering when you want their normal string representation rather than Rich's pretty-print layout.