How to minimize the space inside rows?

[Yoyoda75]

Hi everyone,

Here is a brief summary of my issue. I am trying to create Conway's game of life and my goal is to display the board in the terminal using Rich (maybe not the most efficient way, but it teaches me how to use Rich). The cells are filled with "■" when they are alive, and "□" when they are dead, so they are all the same width and the board should be a square. As you can see in the following screenshot, I managed to minimize the space between each column, but there is still space between each row:

Here is the code that does it :

def update_table(board: Board) -> Table:
    table = Table(title="Game of Life", show_header=False, show_footer=False, show_edge=False, box=None)
    table.padding = (0, 0)
    table.pad_edge = False

    columns = board.shape[1]
    for column in range(columns):
        table.add_column(no_wrap=True)

    for row in board:
        formatted_row = ["■" if element else "□" for element in row]
        table.add_row(*formatted_row)

    return table

I have tried many different combinations of options for Table(), but none let's me do what I want. So does anyone know how I could remove the space between each row entirely ?

Here is the repo if you want to check out the full code (it's only two files): Yoyoda75/game_of_life

Thanks in advance !

[TomJGooding]

Unicode has a full block character (u2588) which hopefully will help explain the gaps between your rows. Try running the code below:

BLACK_SQUARE = "■"  # u25a0
FULL_BLOCK = "█"  # u2588

for _ in range(3):
    print(BLACK_SQUARE, FULL_BLOCK)

[Yoyoda75]

Thanks for your answer, but I don't think this is the result I am aiming for.

I also tried changing the dead cells blocks to another full height block but the result is still not great:

Since I was using square characters and the size of the board is x by x (say 50 by 50), I was planning on having a square board. However, the full height blocks are rectangular and make the board look distorted.

[Yoyoda75]

Never mind, I put two side by side and it seems to do the job.😄 It simply makes the cells quit big. Thank !

[TomJGooding]

I was trying to demonstrate that these gaps are actually in your Unicode square characters, so there isn't anything Rich can do about that.

Character cells in the terminal are roughly twice as high as they are wide, so one option would be to print two of the full block characters for a square:

for _ in range(4):
    print("  ██  ██  ██  ██")
    print("██  ██  ██  ██  ")

Another option which would be more complicated but take up less space would be to use other Unicode blocks - here's an example using upper/lower half blocks:

for _ in range(4):
    print("▄▀▄▀▄▀▄▀")

[EDIT: Sorry I posted my message before I saw your reply that you'd figured the first part out!]