You could detect if stdout is a terminal and then decide for fanciness or machine readability. I think this, along with flags for manually setting rich features, would provide the best of both worlds.

Ahh didn’t know that was a thing. Thanks for setting me straight.

The ability to wrap up arbitrary data sources into an attractive, easy-to-parse TUI. If you have a bunch of things you look at via watch or something similar, wrapping them in this seems like a natural.

Looks like its powerful because you can have a loop and update metrics you can get via python.

I've always wanted to create something like vtop but for network and disk io, this might finally let me do it myself.

Take a look at `glances'. I think it does what you want.