r3blansicolor crate

What does it do?
How to use it?
Build, run, test tasks
- Prerequisites
- Just commands
References
Why make a new crate for this?

What does it do?

Rust crate to generate formatted ANSI 256 (8-bit) and truecolor (24-bit) color output to stdout. On macOS, the default Terminal.app does not support truecolor, so ANSI 256 colors are used instead.

This crate performs its own detection of terminal color capability heuristically. And does not use other crates to perform this function.

Here's a screenshot of running the main example on various operating systems:

How to use it?

The main struct that we have to consider is AnsiStyledText. It has two fields:

text - the text to print.
style - a list of styles to apply to the text.

Here's an example.

rust AnsiStyledText { text: "Print a formatted (bold, italic, underline) string w/ ANSI color codes.", style: &[ Style::Bold, Style::Italic, Style::Underline, Style::Foreground(Color::Rgb(50, 50, 50)), Style::Background(Color::Rgb(100, 200, 1)), ], } .println();

Please a look at the main example to get a better idea of how to use this crate.

Build, run, test tasks

Prerequisites

🌠 In order for these to work you have to install the Rust toolchain and just and cargo-watch:

Install the Rust toolchain using rustup by following the instructions here.
Install cargo-watch using cargo install cargo-watch.
Install flamegraph using cargo install flamegraph.
Install just just on your system using cargo install just. It is available for Linux, macOS, and Windows.
- If you want shell completions for just you can follow these instructions.
- If you install just using cargo install just or brew install just you will not get shell completions without doing one extra configuration step. So on Linux it is best to use sudo apt install -y just if you want them.

Just commands

Note to run a just command named all on Windows, you have to use the following: just --shell powershell.exe --shell-arg -c all

Build: just build
Clean: just clean
Run examples: just run
Run examples with release flag: just run-release
Run examples with flamegraph profiling: just run-flamegraph
Run tests: just test
Run clippy: just clippy
Build docs: just docs
Serve docs: just serve-docs. This is only useful if you SSH into a remote machine via VSCode (where you build and serve the docs) and want to view the docs in a browser on your local machine.
Upgrade deps: just upgrade-deps
Run rustfmt: just rustfmt

The following commands will watch for changes in the source folder and re-run:

Watch run: just watch-run
Watch all test: just watch-all-tests
Watch one test: just watch-one-test <test_name>
Watch clippy: just watch-clippy
Watch macro expansion for one test: just watch-macro-expansion-one-test <test_name>

References

https://notes.burke.libbey.me/ansi-escape-codes/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSIescapecode
https://www.asciitable.com/
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Xterm256colorchart.svg
https://www.ditig.com/256-colors-cheat-sheet
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4842424/list-of-ansi-color-escape-sequences
https://www.compuphase.com/cmetric.htm

Why make a new crate for this?

There are a few crates on crates.io that do similar things but they don't amenable licenses.
Other crates simply ignore ANSI 256 colors and only support truecolor, even when they claim that they support it.
And there are other crates which don't correctly report that macOS Terminal.app does not support truecolor and only supports ANSI 256 color.

Here are some links: