Paintbrush

Paintbrush is an ascii coloring tool for nodejs.

It depends only on util.inspect.

Synopsis

var paint = require ('paintbrush');

console.log (paint ('red', 'red text'));

console.log (paint ('red+black_bg', 'red text on black'));

paint.redOnBlack = paint.bind (paint, 'red+black_bg');
paint.error      = paint.bind (paint, "red+white_bg");
paint.path       = paint.cyan.bind (paint);

// actually this is main reason to publish another one module
console.log (paint.redOnBlack ('red text on black'));


// use to discard colors and repaint output from another program
var httpProcess = child_process.spawn (
	'/usr/bin/env',
	['dataflows', 'daemon', '--no-fork'], {
		stdio: ['pipe', 'pipe', 'pipe']
	}
);

httpProcess.stderr.on ('data', function (data) {
	// paint grey every string chunk without color information
	// to differentiate between server and client output
	process.stdout.write (paint.fillUnpainted ('grey', data.toString()));
});

httpProcess.stdout.on ('data', function (data) {
	if (verbose) {
		process.stdout.write (paint.fillUnpainted ('grey', data.toString()));
	}
	if (!ignoreStdout) shellOutput += data;
	if (!ignoreStdout) {
		var m = paint.stripColor (shellOutput).match (/http initiator running at http:\/\/([^:]+):([^\/]+)/);
		if (m) {
		// …
		}
	}
});

API

var paint = require ('paintbrush');

paint function allows you to write colored messages. First parameter is a color attribute specification. You can use bold, italic, underline and inverse modifiers; white, grey, black, blue, cyan, green, magenta, red and yellow colors; also every color you can use as background, just add _bg. Any following arguments joined with space character between them.

console.log (
	paint ("black+italic+cyan_bg", "will paint black italic text", "on cyan", "background")
);

paint.stripColor can be used to discard any color information from string. Also you can use paint.discardColor as an alias.

paint.fillUnpainted will fill any color-absent chunks to color you want. Take a look into example in Synopsis to get idea how it works.