arbol 2026.2.22

arbol -- Arborescent Printouts in Python

arbol | Arborescent Printouts in Python

Do you have a script, a command line tool, or some workflow in Python that has lots of print statements, and you can't make sense of it once it adds up to hundreds of lines on the console? Sounds familiar?

arbol organizes your stdout prints in a hierarchy that follows the structure of your code. Use a simple context manager to define the hierarchy and aprint instead of print, and voila. When the optional dependencies are installed, the output is colored with an exquisitely crafted combination of colors, making it even more visually appealing.

If you are wondering, arbol means tree in Spanish.

Why not use traditional Python logging? We made the choice of sticking to a plain and simple scheme that matches the usage of print statements.

Features

• aprint: Drop-in replacement for the built-in print function
• asection: Context manager to create tree nodes with automatic timing
• section: Decorator to wrap functions in a section
• acapture: Context manager to capture stdout/stderr from third-party code
• Configuration: Control depth, colors, timing display via Arbol class

Installation

Install with pip:

pip install arbol

Or with optional color support:

pip install arbol[colors]

Optional Dependencies

For colors, install the ansicolors package:

pip install ansicolors

For color support on all operating systems (particularly Windows), install colorama:

pip install colorama

Note: both are optional — arbol works fine without them.

Example

from arbol import Arbol, aprint, section, asection, acapture

# Limit the tree depth:
Arbol.max_depth = 4

# Use aprint instead of print
aprint('Test')

# Decorate functions to wrap them in a section:
@section('function')
def fun(x):
    if x >= 0:
        with asection('recursive call'):
            aprint(f"f(x)+1={fun(x - 1)}")

# Context manager lets you go down one level in the tree:
with asection('a section'):
    aprint('a line')
    aprint('another line')
    aprint('we are done \n or are we? \n someone gotta check!')

    with asection('a subsection'):
        aprint('another line')
        aprint('we are done')

    # Works through function calls:
    fun(2)

    # Capture stdout from third-party code (experimental):
    with acapture():
        print("This gets captured")

    # Disable elapsed time display:
    Arbol.elapsed_time = False
    fun(100)

aprint('demo is finished...')

# Turn off all output:
Arbol.enable_output = False
aprint('you will not see this')

Output:

Configuration

All settings are class attributes on Arbol:

Attribute	Default	Description
enable_output	True	Set to False to suppress all output
elapsed_time	True	Set to False to hide timing information
max_depth	math.inf	Maximum tree depth (deeper sections show truncation)
colorful	True	Set to False to disable colors
passthrough	False	Set to True to bypass tree formatting entirely

Color attributes (c_text, c_scaffold, c_timing, c_section, c_truncation) can also be customized with hex color codes.

Roadmap

Ideas we might consider, from serious to speculative:

• More color styles to choose from
• Intercept stdout from C code so that printouts from native libraries are formatted too (unclear if possible)
• Generate tree automatically by inspecting stack
• Interoperability with the logging package
• Better multi-thread/process support — currently printouts get interleaved. One idea: capture outputs per-thread and display them in order when done.

Development

make install    # Install hatch and set up environment
make test       # Run tests
make demo       # Run the demo
make lint       # Run linter (ruff)
make format     # Format code (ruff)
make check      # Run all checks (lint + format)
make publish    # Bump version and release

Contributions

Pull requests welcome!

Authors

• Loic A. Royer (@loicaroyer)
• Ahmet Can Solak (@_ahmetcansolak)