hyld3 / colorful-printf

A printf wrapper supporting color tags, spinners, and progress bars.

Colorful printf

A printf wrapper which supports tag-like color format specifier, which can be dynamically enabled or disabled. Furthermore, it contains an animated spinner and a progress-bar widgets for the console (also with colors).

Requirements

The colorful printf works in any terminal supporting VT100 escape sequences, which are most terminal on Linux. It was successfully tested on XTerm, Konsole, and Gnome Terminal.

Usage

Colorful printf can either be used by linking it to your application (recommended) or in a header-only version which can be directly included (not recommended). The library does not require any special flags to compile.

• Standalone

Simply include the colorpint.h in your C file and add colorprint.c to your project.

See test.c for an example.

• Header only

First, run make header to generate colorpint_header.h. Then, simply include this header in your C file.

See test_header.c for an example.

API

Brief content:

printf_color: A variant of printf which supports tags to specify foreground and background colors.

spinner_start: Creates an animated spinner at the current position.

spinner_update: Updates the text and the animation of the current spinner.

spinner_done: Destroys the current spinner and sets the final text.

progress_start: Creates a progress bar.

progress_update: Updates the state of the progress bar.

Functions:

Function printf_color

It provides the same functionality as printf but additionally supports the specification of foreground and background colors on a letter granularity.

Parameters:

• color: 1 if the output should be colorized, 0 to simply ignore the color tags.
• fmt: The printf format string.
• ...: The corresponding values for the format string.

Returns:

Nothing

Function spinner_start

This function creates an animated spinner at the current position. The spinner animation can be chosen from 5 different animations.

Parameters:

• color: 1 if the output should be colorized, 0 to simply ignore the color tags.
• type: The type of animation. Allowed values are 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4.
• fmt: The printf format string.
• ...: The corresponding values for the format string.

Returns:

Nothing

Function spinner_update

This function updates both the text and the animation of a previously created spinner.

Parameters:

• color: 1 if the output should be colorized, 0 to simply ignore the color tags.
• fmt: The printf format string.
• ...: The corresponding values for the format string.

Returns:

Nothing

Function spinner_done

This function updates both the text and the animation of a previously created spinner to a final state.

Parameters:

• color: 1 if the output should be colorized, 0 to simply ignore the color tags.
• fmt: The printf format string.
• ...: The corresponding values for the format string.

Returns:

Nothing

Function progress_start

This function creates an animated progress bar at the current position.

Parameters:

• color: 1 if the output should be colorized, 0 to simply ignore the color tags.
• max: The number of updates required to be at 100%.
• fmt: The printf format string.
• ...: The corresponding values for the format string.

Returns:

Nothing

Function progress_update

This function updates the state of a previously created progress bar.

Parameters:

• color: 1 if the output should be colorized, 0 to simply ignore the color tags.

Returns:

Nothing