Colout

Color Up Arbitrary Command Ouput

+ Project maintained by nojhan + Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham +

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colout

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Introduction

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colout is a simple command to add colors to a text stream in your terminal.

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The colout command line interface has been carefully designed to be simple. Basically, you will call it like: <text +stream> | colout <pattern to color> [color [style]].

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colout has the ability to use 8 colors mode, 256 colors mode, colormaps, themes and source code syntax coloring. +Patterns are regular expressions.

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You can think of colout as an alternative to grep --color which will preserve the surrounding context, whith more +powerful coloring capabilites.

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Useful examples

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Basic coloring

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In the most simple use, you just have to call colout word to highlight what you want to spot in a text stream. This is +particularly useful when examining logs.

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Color every occurence of the word "fail" in bold red, in the boot log: +tail /var/log/boot.log | colout fail

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Using regular expressions, you can highlight anything you want in a text stream.

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Color every line containing the word "fail" in bold red, in the boot log: +tail /var/log/boot.log | colout "^.*fail.*$" red bold

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Color in blue the user name of the ps output that have been greped: +ps aux | grep firefox | colout "^\w+\s" blue

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Multiple colors

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Using groups in the regular expressions, you can highlight several matchs in different colors.

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Highlight the different parts of the permissions of files in your home directories, that are rwx for user and group, +but r-x for others: +ls -l ~ | colout "^(d*)-*(rwx)(rwx)(r-x)" blue,red,yellow,green

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Using colormaps, you can change the colors for each lines, this is particularly useful for reading logs that have long +lines that are wrapped. +tail /var/log/kern.log | colout "^.*$" rainbow

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If you want more colors, you can highlight each line of your log with a random one among the 256 ANSI colors: +tail /var/log/dmesg | colout "^.*$" Random

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You can even fill your screen with esoteric disco characters (not that useful, but fun): +cat /dev/urandom | colout "." Random

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Source code

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You can use colout as a basic proxy to the pygments library, if you want to highlight a source code.

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For example, let say you want to have a quick look at a source file, without being bothered by comments and empty lines: +tail colout.py | grep -v "#" | grep -v "^\s*$" | colout -s Python monokai

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But even more interesting, you can highlight the syntax of the matching parts of your text stream, which is useful +for spotting code in a log.

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For example, color the code parts in the output of g++ (they come inside single quotes): +make 2>&1 | colout "'.*'" Cpp vim

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Themes

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colout comes with a set of handy shortcuts for coloring common outputs.

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For example, if you often build your software with cmake but find its coloring scheme a bit boring, you can use the +following shortcut: +make 2>&1 | colout -t cmake

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You can, of course, combine several calls to colout using pipes: +make 2>&1 | colout -t cmake | colout -t g++

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Tips

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To be able to use the syntax highlighting, you should install the python-pygments library.

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colout -h will give you the lists of available colors, themes and programming languages.

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Colormaps and source code syntax highlighting most often comes in 8 or 256 colors mode. Use a lower case first letter +for the 8 colors mode and an upper case first one for the 256 colors.

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The 8 colors mode syntax highlighting only comes in two styles: light and dark. If you want more fancy styles, you +should use 256 colors mode, and thus upper case the first letter of the language name, or else the style is ignored.

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You can leave simple words without quotes, but it is better to put the regexp in quotes to avoid escaping special +characters that would overwise be interpreted +by your shell (like parenthesis).

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Do not hesitate to design your own theme, they are defined as separated files, and basically are just like chaining +several calls to colout in pipes, with the possibility to use python code around.