133 lines
4.6 KiB
Markdown
133 lines
4.6 KiB
Markdown
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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particularly useful when examining logs.
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Color every occurence of the word "fail" in bold red, in the boot log:
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`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:
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`tail /var/log/boot.log | colout "^.*fail.*$" red bold`
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Color in blue the user name of the `ps` output that have been greped:
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`ps aux | grep firefox | colout "^\w+\s" blue`
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### Multiple colors
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Using groups in the regular expressions, you can highlight several matchs in different colors.
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Highlight the different parts of the permissions of files in your home directories, that are `rwx` for user and group,
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but `r-x` for others:
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`ls -l ~ | colout "^(d*)-*(rwx)(rwx)(r-x)" blue,red,yellow,green`
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Using colormaps, you can change the colors for each lines, this is particularly useful for reading logs that have long
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lines that are wrapped.
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`tail /var/log/kern.log | colout "^.*$" 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:
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`tail /var/log/dmesg | colout "^.*$" Random`
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You can even fill your screen with esoteric disco characters (not _that_ useful, but fun):
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`cat /dev/urandom | colout "." Random`
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### Source code
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You can use colout as a basic proxy to the pygments library, if you want to highlight a source code.
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For example, let say you want to have a quick look at a source file, without being bothered by comments and empty lines:
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`tail colout.py | grep -v "#" | grep -v "^\s*$" | 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
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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):
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`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
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following shortcut:
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`make 2>&1 | colout -t cmake`
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You can colorize almost any text stream to make it more readable, see this comparison of the output of Valgrind:
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You can, of course, combine several calls to colout using pipes:
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`make 2>&1 | colout -t cmake | colout -t g++`
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As colout is a KISS tool, you can even use it in hacks involving the shell,
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like colorizing the output of GDB commands:
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Try the `example.gdbinit` shipped with colout (copy/link it as `~/.gdbinit`).
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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
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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
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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
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characters that would overwise be interpreted
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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
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several calls to colout in pipes, with the possibility to use python code around.
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