blessings

What it is and what it does

Blessings wraps terminal capabilities to let you add colors, text styles, and cursor positioning to console output without the boilerplate of curses. It abstracts away low-level terminfo calls and handles the common case of detecting whether output is going to a real terminal or being piped to a file, so you can write clean, readable code that degrades gracefully when terminal features aren't available.

The package provides a single Terminal object with attributes for colors (red, green, bold, underline, etc.), compound formatting (bold_red_on_green), and context managers for temporary cursor movement. It depends only on six and has no compiled dependencies, making it lightweight and portable across Python 2.7 and Python 3.4+.

Use it for:

• Add colored output to CLI tools and scripts without verbose curses setup.
• Build progress bars or status displays that update at a fixed screen position.
• Format log output or error messages with colors and emphasis for better readability.
• Create interactive terminal UIs that need text styling and cursor control.
• Write terminal-aware code that gracefully omits formatting when output is redirected.

Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying

Blessings provides a clean Python API for terminal colors, text styling (bold, underline, reverse), and cursor positioning without the complexity of raw curses calls.

Yes, if you need terminal styling in a Python CLI or TUI. The package is stable, permissively licensed, and has low friction. The aging maintenance (last release 2018) is a minor concern for new projects, but the stable API and high download volume suggest it works well for its narrow, well-defined purpose. Not worth installing if you only need basic ANSI color codes or are targeting modern async frameworks.

Install

blessings on PyPI

pip install blessings

uv add blessings

poetry add blessings

Installing blessings

Before you install

Low install friction with wheels for both Python 2 and 3. Maintenance is aging—last release was 2018-06-21 and no commits since 2025-08-28—but the package is marked Production/Stable and remains actively used (1.1M monthly downloads).

License in practice

MIT license (permissive) places no restrictions on use, modification, or distribution in proprietary or open-source projects.

Quickstart

from blessings import Terminal

term = Terminal()
print(term.bold('Hello') + ' ' + term.red('world'))
with term.location(0, term.height - 1):
    print('Bottom of screen')

Verify before relying

• Whether the package works reliably on Windows (classifiers list only POSIX; behavior on non-POSIX terminals is not documented in the excerpt).
• Current compatibility with Python 3.7+ (classifiers only list up to 3.6; requires_python allows it but no explicit testing evidence provided).

Package facts

Evidence: blessings-1.7-py2-none-any.whl; blessings-1.7-py3-none-any.whl

Keywords: terminal, tty, curses, ncurses, formatting, style, color, console

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