A this moment the summary line is the same regarless if you effectively executed any tests or if you just did a discovery with commands like pytest --collect-only or pytest-collect-only -k foo.

The expectation is to see in the summary how many tests were collected and how many tests were deselected.

The collected/deselected/selected is printed early but not part of the summary and if you have more than ~40-60 tests selected, you will need to scroll a lot to spot that information.

The proposal here is to include this information in the summary line, which is clearly easier to read.

Current output

# pytest --collect-only
==== no tests ran in 1.66s ====
# pytest --collect-only -k filter
==== 544 deselected in 1.67s ====

Expected output

# pytest --collect-only
==== 123 selected, no tests ran in 1.66s ====
# pytest --collect-only -k filter
==== 123 selected, 544 deselected in 1.67s ====

Details

Some feedback regarding the formatting of the summary when run in collection mode would be appreciated.

Example of how visible is the summary line versus the "collected" line, the one that usually gets lost in the terminal output. (pco is my alias for pytest --collect-only)