Option to print help to std out

Author: cbrochtrupCreated Aug 21, 2019Updated Mar 20, 2026
Labelsenhancement

Thanks for creating Fire. It's a fantastic argument parsing tool.

A minor request: I prefer my help strings to be printed to stdout instead of a console like less. When the output is sent to a less-like program you can't reference the script argument information when trying to type your next command.

The naive way to allow this option is adding a switch so the user can choose to send information console package or to stdout (code below).

https://github.com/google/python-fire/blob/d77453938a4b7a5a2bb71d9cb40397ee8bbc2e0a/fire/core.py#L171 to something like

if print_std:
   print(text, file=out)
else:
   console_io.More(

I don't see an elegant way to set print_std in your source code since you are not accepting contributions to your console package and the Display function is not a method of the Fire class. I don't see a straightforward way to have the user set this display option. Obviously, you know the code better than me so you may know a good way to add this option.

I am using fire version 0.2.1 and have seen this behavior with Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04.

Thank you for your time!