colout — Color Up Arbitrary Command Output

Synopsis

colout [-h] [-r [RESOURCE]]

colout [-g] [-c] [-l min,max] [-a] [-t] [-T DIR] [-P DIR] [-d COLORMAP] [-s] [-e CHAR] [-E CHAR] [--debug] PATTERN [COLOR(S) [STYLE(S)]]

Description

colout read lines of text stream on the standard input and output characters matching a given regular expression PATTERN in given COLOR and STYLE.

If groups are specified in the regular expression pattern, only them are taken into account, else the whole matching pattern is colored.

You can specify several colors or styles when using groups by separating them with commas. If you indicate more colors than groups, the last ones will be ignored. If you ask for fewer colors, the last one will be duplicated across remaining groups.

Available colors are: blue, black, yellow, cyan, green, magenta, white, red, rainbow, random, Random, Spectrum, spectrum, scale, Scale, hash, Hash, none, an RGB hexadecimal triplet (#11aaff, for example) or any number between 0 and 255.

Available styles are: normal, bold, faint, italic, underline, blink, rapid_blink, reverse, conceal or random (some styles may have no effect, depending on your terminal).

In some case, you can indicate a foreground and a background color, by indicating both colors separated by a period (for example: red.blue). You can also use this system to combine two styles (for example, for a bold style that also blinks: bold.blink).

rainbow will cycle over a the default colormap at each matching pattern. Rainbow will do the same over the default colormap for the 256-colors mode (this requires a terminal that supports the 256 color escape sequences).

Random will color each matching pattern with a random color among the default colormap (the 255 available in the ANSI table, by default). random will do the same in 8 colors mode.

spectrum and Spectrum are like rainbows, but with more colors (8 and 36 colors).

scale (8 colors) and Scale (256 colors) will parse the numbers characters in the matching text as a decimal number and apply the default colormap according to its position on the scale defined by the -l option (see below, "0,100" by default).

hash (8 colors) and Hash (256 colors) will take a fingerprint of the matching text and apply the default colormap according to it. This ensure that matching texts appearing several times will always get the same color.

Before interpreting the matched string as a number, colout will remove any character not supposed to be used to write down numbers. This permits to apply this special color on a large group, while interpreting only its numerical part.

You can use the name of a syntax-coloring "lexer" as a color (for example: "Cpp", "ruby", "xml+django", etc.).

If GIMP palettes files (*.gpl) are available, you can also use their names as a colormap (see the -P switch below).

Note that the RGB colors (either the hex triplets or the palettes's colors) will be converted to their nearest ANSI 256 color mode equivalents.

When not specified, a COLOR defaults to red and a STYLE defaults to bold.

colout comes with some predefined themes to rapidly color well-known outputs (see the -t switch below).

colout can be used as an interface to pygments (see also the --source switch below).

To have a list of all colors, styles, special colormaps, themes, palettes and lexers, use the -r switch (see below).

colout is released under the GNU Public License v3.

Installation

The recomended method is using pip to install the package for the local user:

$ pip install --user colout

Another method is using pipsi (pipsi is no longer maintained, https://github.com/mitsuhiko/pipsi/blob/db3e3fccbe4f8f9ed1104ed7293ec8fec6579efc/README.md#L3)

$ pipsi install colout

There is also a PPA for Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial)/18.04 (Bionic) (@0.6.1-3~dist7, not actively maintained)

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:csaba-kertesz/random
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get/aptitude install colout

Options

-h, --help: Show a help message and exit
-g, --groups: For color maps (like "rainbow"), iterate over matching groups in the pattern instead of over patterns.
-c, --colormap: Use the given list of comma-separated colors as a colormap (cycle the colors at each match).
-l min,max, --scale min,max: When using the 'scale' colormap, parse matches as decimal numbers (taking your locale into account) or as arithmetic expression (like "1+2/0.9*3") and apply the rainbow colormap linearly between the given min,max (0,100, by default).
-a, --all: Color the whole input at once instead of line per line (really useful for coloring a source code file with strings on multiple lines).
-t, --theme: Interpret PATTERN as a predefined theme (perm, cmake, g++, etc.).
-T DIR, --themes-dir DIR: Search for additional themes (colout_*.py files) in this directory.
-P DIR, --palettes-dir DIR: Search for additional palettes (*.gpl files) in this directory.
-d COLORMAP, --default COLORMAP: When using special colormaps (random, scale or hash), use this COLORMAP instead of the default one. This can be either one of the available colormaps or a comma-separated list of colors. WARNING: be sure to specify a default colormap that is compatible with the special colormap's mode, or else the colors may not appear the same. Also, external palettes are converted from RGB to 256-ANSI and will thus not work if you use them as default colormaps for a 8-colors mode special color.
-r [TYPE(S)], --resources [TYPE(S)]: Print the names of available resources. Use a comma-separated list of resources names (styles, colors, special, themes, palettes, colormaps or lexers), use 'all' (or no argument) to print all resources.
-s, --source: Interpret PATTERN as source code readable by the Pygments library. If the first letter of PATTERN is upper case, use the 256 color mode, if it is lower case, use the 8 colors mode. In 256 color mode, interpret COLOR as a Pygments style (e.g. "default").
-e CHAR, --sep-list CHAR: Use this character as a separator for list of colors/resources/numbers (instead of comma).
-E CHAR, --sep-pair CHAR: Use this character as a separator for foreground/background pairs (instead of period).
--debug: Debug mode: print what's going on internally, if you want to check what features are available.

Regular expressions

A regular expression (or regex) is a pattern that describes a set of strings that matches it.

colout understands regex as specified in the re python module. Given that colout is generally called by the command line, you may have to escape special characters that would be recognize by your shell.

Dependencies

Necessary Python modules:

pygments for the source code syntax coloring
babel for a locale-aware number parsing

Limitations

Don't use nested groups or colout will duplicate the corresponding input text with each matching colors.

Using a default colormap that is incompatible with the special colormap's mode (i.e. number of colors) will end badly.

Color pairs (foreground.background) work in 8-colors mode for simple coloring, but may fail with --colormap.

Examples

Simple

Color in bold red every occurrence of the word color in colout sources: cat colout.py | colout color red bold
Color in bold violet home directories in /etc/passwd: colout '/home/[a-z]+' 135 < /etc/passwd
Color in yellow user/groups id, in bold green name and in bold red home directories in /etc/passwd: colout ':x:([0-9]+:[0-9]+):([^:]+).*(/home/[a-z]+)' yellow,green,red normal,bold < /etc/passwd
Color in yellow file permissions with read rights for everyone: ls -l | colout '.(r.-){3}' yellow normal
Color in green read permission, in bold red write and execution ones: ls -l | colout '(r)(w*)(x*)' green,red normal,bold
Color in green comments in colout sources: colout '.*(#.*)$' green normal < colout.py
Color in bold green every numbers and in bold red the words error in make output: make 2>&1 | colout '[0-9]+' green normal | colout error

Somewhat useful

Use a different color for each line of the auth log grep user /var/log/auth.log | colout "^.*$" rainbow
Color each line of a file with a different color among a 256 color gradient from cyan to green: head /var/log/auth.log | colout -c "^.*$" 39,38,37,36,35,34
Color permissions with a predefined template: ls -l | colout -t perm
Color in light green comments in non-empty colout sources, with the sharp in bold green: grep -v '^\s*$' colout.py | colout '.*(#)(.*)$' green,119 bold,normal
Color a make output, line numbers in yellow, errors in bold red, warning in magenta, pragma in green and C++ file base names in cyan: make 2>&1 | colout ':([0-9]+):[0-9]*' yellow normal | colout error | colout warning magenta | colout pragma green normal | colout '/(\w+)*\.(h|cpp)' cyan normal Or using themes: make 2>&1 | colout -t cmake | colout -t g++
Color each word in the head of auth.log with a rainbow color map, starting a new colormap at each new line (the beginning of the command is just bash magic to repeat the string "(\w+)\W+": L=$(seq 10) ; P=${L//??/(\\w+)\\W+} ; head /var/log/auth.log | colout -g "^${P}(.*)$" rainbow
Color source code in 8 colors mode, without seeing comments: cat colout.py | grep -v "#" | colout -s python
Color source code in 256 color mode: cat colout.py | colout -s Python monokai
Color a JSON stream: `ech

Colout

Install / Use

README