paoloantinori/hhighlighter

A command line tool to highlight terms

hhighlighter (or just h)

A tiny utility to highlight multiple keywords with different colors

• Idea: Paolo Antinori

• Based on: ack - http://beyondgrep.com/ written by Andy Lester

Description

h (hhighlighter is just a name to help search engines) is a really tiny helper script meant to highlight keywords in the output of another *nix command:

Requirements

h is just a tiny facade in front of ack so you need to install it first.

What is ack?

ack is a tool like grep, optimized for programmers

Designed for programmers with large heterogeneous trees of source code, ack is written purely in portable Perl 5 and takes advantage of the power of Perl’s regular expressions.

see: http://beyondgrep.com/

ack installation

ack is part of many major linux distributions so you should use your package manager to install it.

see: http://beyondgrep.com/install/

If you want to install ack in a portable way ( at the end ack is just a script ) you do it in this way:

curl https://beyondgrep.com/ack-2.16-single-file > ~/bin/ack && chmod 0755 !#:3

Installation Instructions

h is implemented as a function in bash.

You can install it in one of these ways:

• copy and paste h() function in your ~/.bashrc

• configure your ~/.bashrc to load the external script with . /path/to/h.sh

or using Shinichi Okada’s Awesome Package Manager - https://github.com/shinokada/awesome - awesome -i paoloantinori/hhighlighter h

Zsh with Oh-My-Zsh

Just run the following commands

cd $ZSH_CUSTOM/plugins
git clone [email protected]:paoloantinori/hhighlighter.git h
mv h/h.sh h/h.plugin.zsh

then add h to your plugins variable in your ~/.zshrc file.

plugins=(
  h
  ...
)

Platform Specifics

h has currently been tested only on bash and zsh on Linux and MacOSX.

Usage

h is meant to consume the output of another Linux command via pipe

$ h
usage: YOUR_COMMAND | h [-i] [-d] args...
	-i : ignore case
	-d : disable regexp
	-n : invert colors

Configuration

h supports overriding of its default colors via 2 environment variables: H_COLORS_FG and H_COLORS_BG.

These variables accepts a comma separated values set of Perl Term::ANSIColor configuration entries. For a table of RGB colors definition check this handy map:

Figure 1: RGB Map, taken from https://github.com/jbnicolai/ansi-256-colors

Ex.

export H_COLORS_FG="bold black on_rgb520","bold red on_rgb025"
export H_COLORS_BG="underline bold rgb520","underline bold rgb025"
echo abcdefghi | h   a b c d

Examples

Default colors

echo "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvxywz" | h   a b c d e f g h i j k l

Invert colors

echo "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvxywz" | h -n   a b c d e f g h i j k l

Support for tail in follow mode

tail -F | h keyword1 keyword2

Case Insensitive

mvn clean install | h -i failure success

Disable regular expression

tail -F my.log | h -d org.apache.camel

Highlight multiple keys with the same color (using regexp syntax)

echo abcd | h 'b|d'

Screenshots

Demos

Ascii Cinema GifAscii Cinema Gif

Ascii Cinema: Ascii Cinema

hhighlighter's Issues

Work with ack installed as ack-grep

I have ack installed on my Ubuntu Machine (14.04.2 LTS), but it is not installed as ack but as ack-grep. I think it is that way by default in Ubuntu to avoid a name collision with some other tool. Could h detect ack-grep and use that?

Regex support

I love this awesome utility, I appreciate your work 😃
I will try to implement it and contribute a PR.

my use case is to highlight all characters which are not in the unicode range U+0021-U+007A (which's a subset of the basic latin block)

No output

I installed it on Zsh using Zplugin:

zplg ice as"command" cp"h.sh -> h" pick"h"
zplg load paoloantinori/hhighlighter

But running the examples, also after the example export commands, yields empty output. I tried changing #!/bin/bash to #!/usr/local/bin/bash to use OS X Homebrew Bash 4.4, but no improvement. Maybe the command doesn't support OS X?

You might want to run h.sh through ShellCheck

The usually wonderful shellcheck utility complains about half a dozen lines. You might want to heed its suggestions (or else add shellcheck ignore=) lines.

Invocation with multiple patterns like "1 '[2-9]+'" leads to output corruption

The two pattern by themselves are fine, but when combined, the output gets corrupted:

piping with less

First of all...very good tool!

This might be a known limitation, but when I do like this

cat LICENSE.txt | h copyright | less

It displays like that: (just color encodings shown instead of colors)

"Licensor" shall mean the ESC[4;1;31mcopyrightESC[0m owner or entity authorized byESC[0mESC[K
  the ESC[4;1;31mcopyrightESC[0m owner that is granting the License.ESC[0mESC[K

I'm just curious, supporting less would be quite a challenge or is it feasible?

The README could usefully specify how to install on bash

I gathered that one downloads or copy-pastes h.sh from the repo. Others might struggle to work that out.

You can install hhighlighter with Awesome package manager

Hi, I created Awesome package manager and I can install your repo using it.

After installing the Awesome:

awesome -i paoloantinori/hhighlighter h

If you can put it in your README, it will be awesome.

Thanks.

Shin

Bash's 'nounset' yields 'ZSH_VERSION: unbound variable'

I put the latest code of s.sh into a file.

I created this:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -o nounset
source "/my/path/h.sh" # replace with a real path
echo "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvxywz" | h a b c d e f g h i j k l

Result: h.sh: line 59: ZSH_VERSION: unbound variable,

local _i=0 in bash declares _i as string

Noticed that in bash, your code:
local _i=0
then later
_i=$i+1
ends up with:
_i=0+1+1+1
Intended code for bash should be (not tested on other shells):
local -i _i=0

wrong behaviour with single digit keywords

$ echo 123 | h 1 2 3
31m132m23

tmux version 1.9.6
zsh version zsh 5.0.7 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)

[ Feature request] Add version and author

Add version option:

h -V
h -A

Currently not implemented:

$ h -V
usage: YOUR_COMMAND | h [-idn] args...
    -i : ignore case
    -d : disable regexp
    -n : invert colors

How to change color, how to get a full list of colors

hello,
i am trying unsuccessfully to custum the colors, it is very painfull, sorry.

this is the error I have:
#############################
export H_COLORS_FG="bold black on_rgb520","bold red on_rgb025" (=> why is ther an on_ appearing there ?)

export H_COLORS_BG="underline bold rgb520","underline bold rgb025"

🕙 09:25:39 ❯ echo a | h a
Invalid attribute name on_rgb520,bold at /opt/homebrew/bin/ack line 993.
#############################

• please, I would like a page, where I can see and simply copy paste the colors in your env variable, so it works easily and I know easily the colors I am using, because I want more than 12 colors. Is there one ?
• or could ACK or another tool do the same job easier ? kind of highlight alternative in 2023 ?
• do I need to setup your env variable before or after : source "$COSMOS_LIB/h/h.sh" ?
• what is the recommended way to pipe hightlight colors if more than 12 colors needed ?
• is that normal that sometimes, when opening, closing the bash,, I do not know why, it is like colors are not displaying in the same order, the red become green , on not background become background color... I did not succeed to identify the case where this happen ?

tks a lot

feature: option to disable --passthru

Example: I'm parsing a mail log and I just want to see when a message comes in and the line that prints the result of the spam filtering. For now, I have to insert a grep line into the pipeline before h. This is not all bad, though, since I can filter on one string and highlight another.

Does not work

No, seriously. I copied h.sh into ~/h.sh. I have installed ack via Homebrew on OSX 10.11.3 (note - that's a beta version of OSX), and it's working:

ack 2.14
Running under Perl 5.22.1 at /opt/local/bin/perl5.22

Copyright 2005-2014 Andy Lester.

This program is free software.  You may modify or distribute it
under the terms of the Artistic License v2.0.

Then I added the following line to my ~/.zshrc:

. ~/h.sh

Then I did this to test it out:

$ tail -f /var/log/system.log | h System

Which gave this:

usage: YOUR_COMMAND | h [-idn] args...
    -i : ignore case
    -d : disable regexp
    -n : invert colors

Incorrect ack install instructions

The readme has installation instructions that point to an old, outdated version of ack

curl http://beyondgrep.com/ack-2.08-single-file > ~/bin/ack && chmod 0755 !#:3

In fact, that version of ack has a security hole in it.

Now you can install using awesome shell script package manager

I just installed hr using awesome package manager.

If you can add it to your document, it will be great.