Safe Coloured Text
Requirements / Design goals
- Use
String
/Text
/ByteString
correctly: Some things are strings of characters, some things are text, some things are bytes. Those are not the same. - No partial functions
- Represent chunks of coloured text purely
- Be able to print chunks of coloured text quickly
- Be able to turn chunks of coloured text into non-coloured text for when terminals don't support (certain) colours.
- (Ideally) output minimal amounts of overhead
- As few dependencies as possible.
- Well-tested
- British spelling (because I can)
Few dependencies
Only bytestring
, text
and terminfo
and the relevant validity
library.
Well-tested
The safe-coloured-text
library already has over 10'000 tests.
Most of them are golden tests, and ensure that the output stays correct even if the library changes.
Minimal output
These two strings look the same, but the second is almost twice as long:
safe-coloured-text
:
\ESC[34mTests:\ESC[m
Passed: \ESC[32m0\ESC[m
Failed: \ESC[32m0\ESC[m
Test suite took \ESC[33m 0.00 seconds\ESC[m
rainbow
:
\ESC[0m\ESC[38;5;4mTests:\ESC[0m
\ESC[0m\ESC[0m
\ESC[0m\ESC[0m
\ESC[0m\ESC[0m
\ESC[0m\ESC[0m
\ESC[0m \ESC[0m\ESC[0mPassed: \ESC[0m\ESC[0m\ESC[38;5;2m0\ESC[0m
\ESC[0m \ESC[0m\ESC[0mFailed: \ESC[0m\ESC[0m\ESC[38;5;2m0\ESC[0m
\ESC[0m \ESC[0m\ESC[0mTest suite took \ESC[0m\ESC[0m\ESC[38;5;3m 0.00 seconds\ESC[0m
\ESC[0m\ESC[0m
The safe-coloured-text
does not emit sequences if a chunk is completely plain, but it does not deal with inter-chunk inefficiencies.
Supports 24-bit colour
This library supports outputting sequences for 24-bit colours.
My urxvt
terminal emulator doesn't even support that, so whatever, but at least it's possible.