Chroma: Colors for your terminal app

Intro

Why?

I started writing more and more Node apps for the terminal and guess what? I liked them in color. So I decided I'd write a module to add colors to text for stuff that's printed to stdout

Yh I know there are other color packages....but this is just MINE!!

Install

npm install --save @v3rse/chroma

Design and Usage

It can be used in the following ways:

chroma.<color>(string);
chroma.<format>(string);
chroma.<format>.<color|bgcolor>(string);

Styles

Colors

• normal (default color)
• black
• red
• blue
• green
• yellow
• magenta
• cyan
• lgray (light gray)
• dgray (dark gray)
• lred
• lblue
• lgreen
• lyellow
• lmagenta
• lcyan
• white

Background Colours

• bgblack
• bgred
• bggreen
• bgyellow
• bgblue
• bgmagenta
• bgcyan
• bgwhite

Formats

• underline
• bold
• dim
• italics(not supported on all terminal emulators)
• strikethrough (not supported on all terminal emulators)

To use, it copy it into your project and do:

var chroma = require('@v3rse/chroma');

Test

node test.js

Some reading

Terminal code (ANSI/VT100) introduction

Long list of codes

• Terminal codes help you issue commands to your terminal itself.
• If the codes are understood they won't be printed but instead cause the terminal to perform an action
• Action may include changing text color or moving the cursor.
• You can use echo to test these codes manually.
• Escape characters are prefixed with 0x1B or 033 in octal form. This is written as \x1b when using echo.
• The code then follows the prefix ( \x1b[2m ) which is followed by whatever text stream.

echo "a\x1b[2mb\x1b[0m"

Tput

• Due to varying terminal control languages you may use a tool like tput as an intermediary to the terminal.
• It detects the terminal and generates necessary escape codes by looking them up the terminfo database.
• It uses acronyms called capability names and parameters to do this.

echo "a$(tput dim)b$(tput sgr0)"

Color codes

• Basic foreground colors start from 30m to 39m
• Basic background colors start from 40m to 49m
• Reset is 0m and tells the terminal where to stop the effects of the previous code. NB: getting more colors depends on your terminal type.

Text formatting

• Underline is 4m and 24m for unsetting.
• Bold is 1m
• Emphasis ("Italics") is 3m
• Dim is 2m

TODO

• [x] Make it work more like chroma.underline.red("Hello Word"); (Thanks to @oddoye-david )
• [x] Make an npm module.
• [x] Add background color feature.(Thanks to @oddoye-david )