r3blansicolor crate

What does it do?
How to use it?
Build, run, test tasks
- Prerequisites
- Commands to run
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 the following crates cargo-cache, cargo-watch, flamegraph, and nu using these instructions:

Install the Rust toolchain using rustup by following the instructions here.
Install cargo-cache using cargo install cargo-cache.
Install cargo-watch using cargo install cargo-watch.
Install flamegraph using cargo install flamegraph.
Install nu using cargo install nu.

Commands to run

The script to run is run.nu. Make sure to mark it executable. It works on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Please make sure that the pre-requisites are installed.

Build: ./run.nu build
Clean: ./run.nu clean
Run examples: ./run.nu run
Run examples with release flag: ./run.nu run-release
Run examples with flamegraph profiling: ./run.nu run-flamegraph
Run tests: ./run.nu test
Run clippy: ./run.nu clippy
Build docs: ./run.nu docs
Serve docs: ./run.nu 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: ./run.nu upgrade-deps
Run rustfmt: ./run.nu rustfmt

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

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