Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

How to do it...

The steps are as follows:

1. The shutil.get_terminal_size function can give guidance on the terminal window size and provide a fallback for cases where it's not available. We will adapt the maketable function from the Aligning text recipe of Chapter 2, Text Management to account for terminal size:

import shutil
import textwrap, itertools

def maketable(cols):
    term_size = shutil.get_terminal_size(fallback=(80, 24))
    colsize = (term_size.columns // len(cols)) - 3
    if colsize < 1:
        raise ValueError('Column too small')
    return '\n'.join(map(' | '.join, itertools.zip_longest(*[
        [s.ljust(colsize) for s in textwrap.wrap(col, colsize)] for col in cols
    ], fillvalue=' '*colsize)))

2. Now it is possible to print any text in multiple columns ...