console-colors ~main

console-colors

Goals

console-colors is an attempt towards making the ultimate zero-hassle console color library for D.

It is meant as a spiritual successor of the colorize package and try to improve it based upon industrial usage of console colors in very important software.

As it is a very competitive field, we'll try to establish some claims using reasoning that this thing is better than some other related things.

Example

import std.stdio;
import consolecolors;

void main(string[] args)
{
    try
    {
        // do stuff that can throw
    }
    catch(CCLException e) // An exception with a coloured message
    {
        cwritefln("\n<lred>Error:</lred> %s", e.msg);
    }
    catch(Exception e) // An uncoloured exception.
    {
        cwritefln("\n<lred>Error:</lred> %s", escapeCCL(e.msg));
    }
}

Cheat Sheet

Features

• Use 16 different colors in the terminal, for foreground and background.

• Bold, italic, blink and underline.

• Escape and un-escape from Console Colors Language (CCL), in order to mix and match coloured and uncoloured exceptions in your codebase. Now you can `throw` with color information.

• One file, can be copied in your project.

• Color information can be given in two ways:

• Within text with easy-to-remember tags, such as "my <blue> text is <red>coloured</red></blue>" Syntax errors within this DSL called CCL throw, with error messages that are themselves coloured.

• with string helper UFCS functions, such as "my" ~ ("text is " ~ "coloured".red).blue

• Portable with a special cwrite[f][ln] call, like the colorize package. Indeed, color information need to be inline within text, to properly nest in format strings. console-colors has a color stack to restore the previously set color and font style.

• All colors have an easy shortcut like .lmagenta or .white, making it easier to add color in the first place (at the cost of your namespace).

• UTF-8 can be enabled on Windows, with enableConsoleUTF8().

• Colors can be disabled globally, with disableConsoleColors(). It is an often wanted thing in command-line tools with colors. Colors are also disabled if stdout isn't a terminal, or if the terminal initialization failed.

We are heading towards the ultimate console in D. Reaching for the stars here. You have no excuse anymore not to have colors in your terminal.

Changelog

• v1.3 Windows VT-100 detection, skips the emulation layer. New enableConsoleUTF8() call to set UTF-8 on Windows. Add bold, italic, underline and blink tags.

• v1.2 stderr support with stderr.cwritexxx("some CCL text");

Caveats

• Any text that goes through cwrite must be CCL, so uncoloured input has to be escaped with escapeCCL. If you forget this, you will get a nice coloured CCLException that points out the issue.
• < MUST be escaped with the entity <
• > MUST be escaped with the entity >
• & MUST be escaped with the entity &

If it's worth having a command-line, then it's worth having colours.