Colout – add colors to a text stream in your terminal

Colout – add colors to a text stream in your terminal(nojhan.github.io)

116 points by nojhan 13 years ago | 40 comments

Not entirely sure of the feature overlap, but this seems to reinvent grcat and its frontend, grc [1], a little bit.

Grcat lets you configure commands with colour regexps. Then you just prefix the command with "grc", and it will colorize the output according the rules. It's useful to alias commands this way:

    $ alias make="grc make"

colout seems most useful when you are want to highlight arbitrary patterns independent of the command, eg. "tail some.log | colout ...".

[1] http://kassiopeia.juls.savba.sk/~garabik/software/grc/README...

nojhan 13 years ago | |

Indeed. Having to build configuration file for each command was a pain in the ass. Colout is better integrated in my shell workflow and shows that config files are not mandatory (but colout themes do just the same).

Plus, colout have a tons of additional features (256-colors mode, colormaps, etc.).

lobster_johnson 13 years ago | | |

Really? grcat/grc's configs are very simple. For example, this is the config for colorizing diffs:

    regexp=^\+(.*$)
    colours=bold green
    count=more
    =======
    regexp=^\-(--.+$|[^\-].*$|$)
    colours=bold red
    count=more
    ========
    regexp=^\>([^\>].*|$)
    colours=bold green
    count=more
    =======
    regexp=^\<([^\<].*|$)
    colours=bold red
    count=more
    =======
    regexp=^@@ .* @@$
    colours=magenta
    count=more

I agree that colout works better for ad-hoc stuff.

You should consider inverting the way it's invoked, though, to be more like grc, otherwise you can't reliably use colout in an alias (as pointed out elsewhere in this thread).

mhw 13 years ago |

Just to be clear, in case the post's headline misleads you, there's nothing OS X specific about colout - it'll work just as happily on Linux. The documentation even points to an PPA from where you can install an Ubuntu package.

msluyter 13 years ago |

Just installed it via pip and gave it a try. I like it! I think I can already find some interesting uses for it. A couple of suggestions:

The website says:

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

But I think that's a typo and should be 'colout -h'.

Also, a handy alias list of common use cases would be great.

nojhan 13 years ago | |

The `-h` switch show the help, but the `-r` show the resources loaded at startup.

Alias for common use cases are named "themes" in the list of resources.

msluyter 13 years ago | | |

Hmm... when I run colout -r, I get:

   % colout -r
   usage: colout.py [-h] [-g] [-c] [-l SCALE] [-a] [-t] [-s]
                  REGEX [COLOR] [STYLE]
   colout.py: error: too few arguments

Fuzzwah 13 years ago |

Love this. Thanks.

I can see a bunch of ways I'll make use of this. The first one I attempted to work on involved trying to color scale the use% in the output of a "df -h".

Alas it didn't work as I expected it:

    $ df -h | colout --scale 0,100 "([0-9]*)%" scale
    ValueError: could not convert string to float:

However if I grep out just the /dev/sda line it does what I expected:

    $ df -h | grep /dev/sda | colout --scale 0,100 "([0-9]*)%" scale
    /dev/sda         20G  3.2G   16G  17% /

The 17% is a pretty blue.

Tips?

nojhan 13 years ago | |

You use the "zero or more" * operator, which will match empty strings in front of the "%". But an empty string cannot be converted to a float. Just use the "at least one" operator: +. Also, the scale is 0,100 by default, you can omit it.

    df -h | colout "([0-9]+)%" scale

Fuzzwah 13 years ago | | |

Thanks for the response. My lazy regex makes me feel bad.

Fuzzwah 13 years ago | |

Also, the install docs mention python2.7 but after a bit of head to brickwall I realised that this is trying to use python3.

To get it working I needed to do:

    sudo python3 setup.py install

And /usr/local/bin/colout was created for me (unlike what it mentions in the readme atm).

JeffJenkins 13 years ago |

I really like the idea of alternating the color of lines of output, although I might use something a bit less bold. Is there an easy way to have command piped through this in bash?

shabble 13 years ago | |

one problem of the 'alias yourcmd to yourcmd | colorize' is dealing with preserving the return code from the actual command, rather than the last in the pipeline.

It can be done with things liek $PIPESTATUS, but some sort of wrapper/function to do it would be nice.

lysium 13 years ago |

Why did you have to switch to python3?

https://github.com/nojhan/colout/commit/37934e9266d05e1519ac...

https://github.com/nojhan/colout/commit/64454e42f1cf5a4f8cd4...

Update: 37934e9 still works with python 2.6

nojhan 13 years ago | |

There is some incompatibility, like the gettext module in the g++ theme, the way themes are imported, unicode support, the print statement… But maybe it's still possible to write a code that work on both versions?

lysium 13 years ago | | |

I see. As a quick fix, I tried to call python 2.6 from the colout script, but that failed because importlib exists only in python3. I don't know how to make it work on both versions, I'm afraid.

JonnieCache 13 years ago |

The background image of this site causes a weird strobing effect on the screen of my MacBook Pro 6,2. Really odd.

When I drag it over to the cinema display it looks fine.

Noone else here in the office can see it, both those with good vision and those who are technically blind. Maybe I have special powers. Or a brain tumor.

EDIT: The tool is great btw :)

sp332 13 years ago | |

Try this test page: http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/inversion.php

gknoy 13 years ago | | |

This is somewhere between "oh god my eyes" and extremely interesting. Thanks for sharing that!

JonnieCache 13 years ago | | |

Thanks. As always HN delivers the goods.

cones688 13 years ago | |

Does the same on my Thinkpad W520 - thought it was something to do with my panel.

nwh 13 years ago | |

Same to my 2012 MBP.

akkartik 13 years ago |

It doesn't do alternating colors, but this reminded me of cw, which saves you the trouble of explicitly piping the output of common commands.

http://freecode.com/projects/cw

tealtan 13 years ago |

This might be a dumb question: are there shells that have a HTML-based front and passes commands into the background? Seems like something like that would be far more flexible than this – which feels like a Jenga tower of hacks.

caseyohara 13 years ago | |

TermKit[1] was built in this way a few years ago. It was novel at the time and the demo[2] seemed promising, but looks like it hasn't been updated in ~2 years now.

[1] https://github.com/unconed/TermKit

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6Z5dnlfcls

ChikkaChiChi 13 years ago |

I like the idea of colored permissions. Even if your aren't looking specifically at them an ls -latest would draw your attention if something we're set insecurely.

ilink 13 years ago |

I was just thinking about how useful something like this would be. Thanks for reading my mind! And now to see if I can get it to work under cygwin.

ajanuary 13 years ago |

Is it just me or is there a bug shown in their second example? The closing square bracket isn't coloured.

nojhan 13 years ago | |

That's because the log was already colored (the word "fail" in red). As colout tries to color the whole line, the previous end escape character is interpreted by the terminal before the last one :

    <red>* This is a colored line [<red>fail<end>]</end>

(You can use the `--debug` switch of colout to get hints about such problems).

iso8859-1 13 years ago |

pygmentize replicates the syntax highlighting featured here, except it is a bit more configurable: http://pygments.org/docs/cmdline/

nojhan 13 years ago | |

It's not really a replication, as colout just _USE_ the pygments library. Colout just add the possibility to color code that is located inside a text that should not be colored, which pygmentize cannot do:

    colout -a -s Python monokai < code.py # just like pygmentize
    colout "^(:*)'(:*)'(:*)$" blue,python,blue < code.py # just the code 'inside quotes', not the rest of the line

regexp=^\+(.*$) colours=bold green count=more ======= regexp=^\-(--.+$|[^\-].*$|$) colours=bold red count=more ======== regexp=^\>([^\>].*|$) colours=bold green count=more ======= regexp=^\<([^\<].*|$) colours=bold red count=more ======= regexp=^@@ .* @@$ colours=magenta count=more

[:~/code/colout/colout] parse_r+* ± colout -r x Available resources: STYLES: reverse, bold, italic, normal, conceal, rapid_blink, faint, underline, blink COLORS: blue, none, black, yellow, cyan, green, magenta, white, red SPECIAL: random, Random, scale, Scale, colormap THEMES: g++, cmake, json, perm COLORMAPS: rainbow, jet72, Spectrum, spectrum, Rainbow LEXERS: Cucumber, abap, ada, ahk, antlr, antlr-as, antlr-cpp, antlr-csharp, antlr-java, antlr-objc, antlr-perl, antlr-python, antlr-ruby, apacheconf, applescript, as, as3, aspx-cs, aspx-vb, asy, basemake, bash, bat, bbcode, befunge, blitzmax, boo, brainfuck, c, c-objdump, cfm, cfs, cheetah, clojure, cmake, coffee-script, common-lisp, console, control, cpp, cpp-objdump, csharp, css, css+django, css+erb, css+genshitext, css+mako, css+myghty, css+php, css+smarty, cython, d, d-objdump, delphi, diff, django, dpatch, duel, dylan, erb, erl, erlang, evoque, factor, felix, fortran, gas, genshi, genshitext, glsl, gnuplot, go, gooddata-cl, groff, haml, haskell, html, html+cheetah, html+django, html+evoque, html+genshi, html+mako, html+myghty, html+php, html+smarty, html+velocity, hx, hybris, ini, io, ioke, irc, jade, java, js, js+cheetah, js+django, js+erb, js+genshitext, js+mako, js+myghty, js+php, js+smarty, jsp, lhs, lighty, llvm, logtalk, lua, make, mako, maql, mason, matlab, matlabsession, minid, modelica, modula2, moocode, mupad, mxml, myghty, mysql, nasm, newspeak, nginx, numpy, objdump, objective-c, objective-j, ocaml, ooc, perl, php, postscript, pot, pov, prolog, properties, protobuf, py3tb, pycon, pytb, python, python3, ragel, ragel-c, ragel-cpp, ragel-d, ragel-em, ragel-java, ragel-objc, ragel-ruby, raw, rb, rbcon, rconsole, rebol, redcode, rhtml, rst, sass, scala, scaml, scheme, scss, smalltalk, smarty, sourceslist, splus, sql, sqlite3, squidconf, ssp, tcl, tcsh, tex, text, trac-wiki, v, vala, vb.net, velocity, vim, xml, xml+cheetah, xml+django, xml+erb, xml+evoque, xml+mako, xml+myghty, xml+php, xml+smarty, xml+velocity, xquery, xslt, yaml