# μStyle || Micro Style
**A text-styling library for Rust `no_std` embedded targets.**
## Motivation
After I tried creating a `no_std` embedded ANSI library, I noticed serious flaws in the ANSI format and decided to
create my own [format](FORMAT.md):
μStyle (pronounced "Micro Style") is a ASCII-compatible text-styling [format](FORMAT.md) and library to style text with
colors and
attributes. The
[format](FORMAT.md) is similar to ANSI, but uses way less bytes and is more compact.
This [format](FORMAT.md) allows for fully heap-less styling of text without much stack-overhead.
## Why μStyle?
- Styling only adds 5 bytes of overhead.
- Very predictable behaviour.
- Fast parsing and low overhead.
- Very lightweight (only dependency is `bitflags`).
- Less complex than ANSI.
## Comparison with ANSI
ANSI and μStyle are both ASCII-compatible text-styling formats.
While ANSI uses tags to style text, μStyle uses a fixed descriptor format which only adds **5 bytes** of overhead while
an ANSI tag can add up to **19 bytes** of overhead.
Keep in mind that you need multiple ANSI tags for fully styled strings.
| Byte overhead | always 5 bytes | up to 19 bytes per tag (possibility of multiple tags, so basically unlimited overhead possible) |
| Colors | only 35 colors (plus `None` color) | built-in, index or RGB (basically all the colors) |
| Attributes | bitflag-based and constant sized | many with separate codes, adding extra style size |
## Limitations
μStyle does have some limitations:
- Only 35 colors (plus `None` color) are supported.
- It's not as expressive as ANSI.
- It's less feature rich than ANSI.
- Delimiters are fixed and cannot be escaped (which is however mostly fine, as they are special characters and not used
in human-readable text anyway).