colorize

A set of Rust macros to assist in turning text into colors for printing on the terminal.

Purpose

As I was working with another command line utility, I wanted the ability to convert regular text into ANSI color formatted text more easily, so I wrote a series of macros to help with formatting and/or printing that could be reusable.

Adding

You can add the macros to your project by using cargo or adding colorize-macros to your depedencies.

cargo add colorize-macros

[dependencies]
colorize-macros = "^0.6"

Usage

use colorize::{print_color, colorize};

// Println "Hello world" in bold green
print_color!(Fgb->"Hello world");

// Returns "Hello" in italic blue and "World" underlined in magenta
let color_string = colorize!(iFb->"Hello", Fmu->"World");
assert_eq!(
    String::from("\x1b[3;34mHello\x1b[0m \x1b[4;35mWorld\x1b[0m"), 
    color_string
);

// Add a format token to multiple inputs using `=>`
// The below example will produce "Hello" with a green foreground, 
// "world" with a blue background, both in bold. 
let color_string = colorize!(b => Fg->"Hello", Bb->"world");
assert_eq!(
    String::from("\x1b[1;32mHello\x1b[0m \x1b[1;44mworld\x1b[0m"),
    color_string
);

// Inputs can be anything that implements the Debug trait
use std::path::PathBuf;

let user_path = PathBuf::from("/home/color/my_new_file.txt");
let pretty_path = colorize!(Fgu->user_path.clone());

assert_eq!(
    String::from("\x1b[32;4m/home/color/my_new_file.txt\x1b[0m"),
    pretty_path
);

print_color!(b => "Moving", Fy->user_path, "to", Fg->PathBuf::from("/home/new_color_dir/my_second_file.txt"));

See the colorize macro docs for further style specs.

New in v.0.7.0 - proc feature

The colorize macro was re-worked as a proc macro to allow for better error handling during the development process. Using the new colorize proc macro, you will see errors during the development process indicating a bad formatting option instead of after you compile/run your code.

To use the new proc feature simply add the feature either -

cargo add colorize-macros --features proc

Or add the proc feature in your Cargo.toml

[depedencies]
...
colorize-macros = { version = "^0.7.0" features = ["proc"]}

No additional changes are needed in your code as the new proc version will simply replace the old colorize import. This goes for the print_color macro as well.

Development

• Add background color
• Add ability to format multiple arguments with the same input (ie colorize!(b => "Hello", Fg-> "world") where "Hello" and "world" are both bold but "world" is the only word that's green)
• Integrate a color set of log macros from the log crate

Special Thanks

This crate was originally inspired by the row macro in prettytable.