erock530/go-color

A lightweight, simple and cross-platform package to colorize text in terminals

go-color

An extremely lightweight cross-platform package to colorize text in terminals.

This is not meant for maximal compatibility, nor is it meant to handle a plethora of scenarios. It will simply wrap a message with the necessary characters, if the OS handles it.

There are many cases in which this would not work, such as the output being redirected to something other than a terminal (such as a file, i.e. executable >> file.txt)

Usage

Function

You can use the color.Colorize(color, message) or color.Ize(color, message) function in conjunction with a variable like so:

package main

import "github.com/erock530/go-color"

func main() {
    println(color.Ize(color.Red, "This is red"))
    // Or if you prefer the longer version
    println(color.Colorize(color.Red, "This is red"))
}

Because I felt reading color.Ize() to be more visually pleasant than color.Colorize(), I included Ize() as an alias for Colorize().

I'm not usually a big fan of having two methods doing the same thing, but since this package doesn't have much room for growth (its only purpose is to colorize terminal outputs, after all, and there aren't hundreds of ways to go about it), I believe it's acceptable to have both.

Variables only

Unlike using the aforementioned approach, directly using the color variables will required you to manually prepend color.Reset at the end of your string.

You can either directly use the variables like so:

package main

import "github.com/erock530/go-color"

func main() {
    println(color.Red + "This is red" + color.Reset)
    println(color.Green + "This is green" + color.Reset)
    println(color.Blue + "This is blue" + color.Reset)
    println(color.Purple + "This is purple" + color.Reset)
    println(color.Yellow + "This is yellow" + color.Reset)
    println(color.Cyan + "This is cyan" + color.Reset)
    println(color.Gray + "This is gray" + color.Reset)
    println(color.White + "This is white" + color.Reset)
}

NOTE: If you're going to use this approach, don't forget to prepend your string with color.Reset, otherwise everything else in your terminal will be that color until the color is reset or overridden.

Installation

go get github.com/erock530/go-color