dvtate / terminal-colors

a colorful terminal text effects library

terminal-colors

A colorful terminal text effects library. It makes using terminal effects ie- color changes, blinking text, rich text, etc. easy by using tools the programmer is familiar with like HTML colors and stdio function wrappers instead of making you memorize escape sequences and manually convert colors.

example.cpp running in xterm

What's included?

Intuitive Color Names

• valid html colors can be used to specify colors instead of individual rgb components
• examples: rgb(120, 0, 255), goldenrod, #3fe2a9, #333
• the parser is actually even less strict than html
• examples: 333, 120,0,255

color_printf()

• void color_printf(uint8_t r, uint8_t g, uint8_t b, const char* format, ...): use the r, g, and b values to give a 24bit color.
• void color_printf(const char* color, const char* format, ...): enter a valid html color (see this if you are confused http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_colors.asp ).
  • note that standard color names are generally slower than hex or rgb values

setFgColor() / setBgColor()

• the functions are the same for setBgColor, however it acts on the background instead of the foreground
• void setFgColor(uint8_t r, uint8_t g, uint8_t b): sets the foreground color to an rgb value
• void setFgColor(const char* color): sets the foreground color to a valid HTML color
• void setFgColor(void): sets the foreground color back to its original state

setTermEffect()

• setTermEffect(uint8_t effect): sets the text effect to whichever text effect you would prefer, there are macros defined for eache effect, but I reccomend reading this ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code#CSI_codes ) wiki article.

resetANSI()

• resetANSI(void): resets the terminal back to its original/default state

fsetFgColor(), fsetBgColor(), fsetTextEffect(), fresetANSI(), color_fprintf(), etc.

• these serve the same function as the regular functions, but allow the output to be piped to a file other than stdout.
• the first argument is the file to replace stdout

Potential Issues:

• Endianess: The struct RGB_t involves a specific byte ordering, it has only been tested on little-endian machines, but big-endian should work. If you have a big-endian machine please share your results. This library should produce undefined output on a middle-endian machine.
• OS/Terminal Compatibility: this library was built for xterm in Arch Linux (2016). The colors should work in any terminal emulator which supports 24-bit colors. The effects are not uniform and you may want to refer to this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code