Coloring terminal ouput

Documentation

term-painter is a cross-platform Rust library for coloring and formatting terminal output. It provides easy ways to format various things and uses the crate rust-lang/term to do the actual formatting. Example:

println!("{} | {} | {} | {} | {}",
    Red.bg(Green).bold().paint("Red-Green-Bold"),
    Blue.paint("Blue"),
    Blue.bold().paint("BlueBold"),
    Blue.bg(Magenta).paint("BlueMagentaBG"),
    Plain.underline().paint("Underline")
);

Red.with(|| {
    print!("JustRed");
    Bold.with(|| {
        print!(" BoldRed {} BoldRed ", Underline.paint("Underline"));
    });
    print!("JustRed ");

    print!("{}", Blue.paint("Blue (overwrite) "));
    Green.with(|| {
        println!("Green (overwrite)");
    });
});

It's easy to use and integrates well with println!/print!. The main design goal was to make it simple. This has one performance disadvantage: It will often reset the terminal style after each printing operation. But performance isn't usually hugely important when printing on the terminal, so simplicity was more important for the design of this library.

More examples here (examples/main.rs) or in the Documentation.

Cross Platform

This crate uses rust-lang/term internally. term supports all (or rather: many) platforms, hence term-painter does, too.

How does it work? In order to work, this crate depends on a specific way how println! and friends evaluate their arguments (which is the common-sense way). There are no guarantees about argument evaluation, but currently it works. And honestly, it's unlikely that this way of evaluation ever changes. But, for example, if println!() would always call format!() first and print the resulting String, it wouldn't work.

Usage

Just add extern crate term_painter; in your crate root and the dependency in your Cargo.toml file:

[dependencies]
term-painter = "0.2"

Collaboration

Yes please! If you find a bug, want to request a feature or anything else: Please open an issue or create a pull request.

Thanks

I've got some design ideas from rust-ansi-term. I decided to make my own crate though, since my goals were too different from ansi-term (specifically: ansi-term does not work everywhere).