Awesome
ChromaTerm
ChromaTerm (ct
) is a Python script that colors your terminal's output using
regular expressions. It even works with interactive programs, like SSH.
Installation
pip3 install chromaterm
Usage
Prefix your command with ct
. It's that simple.
ct ssh somewhere
You can also pipe data into ct
, but some programs behave differently when piped,
like less
would output the entire file.
echo "Jul 14 12:28:19 Message from 1.2.3.4: Completed successfully" | ct
Persistence
To always highlight a program, set up an alias in your .bash_profile
. For
instance, here's one for ssh
.
alias ssh="ct ssh"
If you want to highlight your entire terminal, have ChromaTerm spawn your shell by
modifying the shell command in your terminal's settings to /usr/local/bin/ct /bin/bash --login
.
Replace /bin/bash
with your shell of choice.
Highlight Rules
ChromaTerm reads highlight rules from a YAML configuration file, formatted like so:
rules:
- description: Obligatory "Hello, World"
regex: Hello,?\s+World
color: f#ff0000
- description: Spit some facts (emphasize "NOT" so they get it)
regex: Pineapple does (NOT) belong on pizza
color:
0: bold
1: blink italic underline
The configuration file can be placed in one of the locations below. The first one found is used.
$HOME/.chromaterm.yml
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/chromaterm/chromaterm.yml
($XDG_CONFIG_HOME
defaults to$HOME/.config
)/etc/chromaterm/chromaterm.yml
If no file is found, a default one is created in your home directory.
Check out
contrib/rules
; it has some topic-specific rules that are not included in the defaults.
Description
Optional. It's purely for your sake.
RegEx
The RegEx engine used is Python's re, but it can be switched to PCRE2 (see relevant section below).
Color
Background and Foreground
The color is a hex string prefixed by b
for background (e.g. b#123456
) and
f
for foreground (e.g. f#abcdef
).
Style
In addition to the background and foreground, you can also use blink
, bold
,
invert
, italic
, strike
, and underline
. Though, not all terminals support
those styles; you might not see their effects.
Group
Colors can be applied per RegEx group (see the 2nd example rule). Any group in
the RegEx can be referenced, including group 0
(entire match) and
named groups.
Exclusive
When multiple rules match the same text, ChromaTerm highlights the text with all
of the colors of the matching rules. If you want the text to be highlighted only
by the first rule that matches it, use the exclusive
flag.
- regex: hello
color: bold
exclusive: true
In the code above, no other rule will highlight hello
, unless it comes first
and has the exclusive
flag set.
Palette
You can define colors in a palette and reference them by name. For instance:
palette:
# Created from https://coolors.co/9140f5-bd5df6-e879f6
purple-1: '#9140f5'
purple-2: '#bd5df6'
purple-3: '#e879f6'
rules:
- regex: hello
color: f.purple-1
- regex: hi
color: b.purple-3
When referencing a palette color, prefix it with b.
for background and f.
for
foreground.
PCRE2
If the PCRE2
library is present, you can use it instead of Python's re
engine. When present, an option in ct -h
becomes available.
While the performance improvement is significant (~2x), the two RegEx engines have a few differences; use this option only if you have a good understanding of their unique features.
The default rules work on both engines.
Help
If you've got any questions or suggestions, please open up an issue (always appreciated).
Windows support
To use ChromaTerm on Windows, you will need to run it with the
Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL
)