chroma-dbg

Put your primate brain's pattern recognition to use with syntax highlighting for the standard Debug trait

What is this?

chroma-dbg is a Rust library that provides syntax highlighting for the standard Debug trait. It works by taking the output of your regular Debug implementation, parsing it, and then re-printing it with customizable syntax highlighting, indentation and inlining.

Example

#[derive(Debug)] // Regular std Debug derive macro, no tricks
struct MyStruct {
    field1: i32,
    field2: String,
    field3: Vec<i32>,
}

let my_struct = MyStruct {
    field1: 42,
    field2: "Hello, World!".to_string(),
    field3: vec![1, 2, 3],
};

// Print the struct with standard syntax highlighting
println!("{:#?}");

The output will look like this: So much wasted space for that array! So hard on the eyes! Disgusting!

Now, let's use chroma-dbg to make it look fancy:

use chroma_dbg::ChromaDebug; // Helper trait that's automatically implemented for all types that implement Debug
println!("{}", my_struct.chroma_dbg());

The output will look like this:

Much better! 🎉

Check out the sample for a more extensive example which demonstrates how you can customize the formatting.

Disclaimer: Custom debug implementations

chroma-dbg works well enough with the standard Debug derive macro, but it isn't quite hardened against wacky debug formatting yet, which may cause the parser to fail. If that happens, the dbg_chroma() method will fall back to the regular Debug implementation..

If you encounter such a case, please open an issue with the debug output that caused the problem, and I will try to make the parser play nice with more wild syntaxes.