Colorless

Colorless is a fork of less which colorizes output based on regular expressions defined in a configuration file.

Why colorless?

At my current work, I make extensive use of less to review large text files and I had always thought that a bit of color would assist in identifying interesting patterns when quickly scanning a file.

Example

Before

After

How it works

in your home folder you will need to create a .colorless file. This will be your global configuration file. If you want to have different colorization for different projects you can create a local .colorless which will override the global settings.

.colorless

The configuration is split into two parts.

1. A initialise list of color pairs. These are used for parentheses, square and curly bracket coloring. If a list isn't provided, The colors of the second part of the configuration are used
2. A list defining regular expressions and the corresponding color.

Example .colorless

RED_DEF
YEL_DEF
BLU_DEF
GRE_DEF
MAG_DEF
CYA_DEF
WHI_RED
BLA_YEL 

WHI_RED F ERROR
BLA_YEL F WARNING
CYA_DEF S [0-9]{2}:[0-9]{2}:[0-9]{2}.[0-9]{6}
DEF_MAG S [0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+
GRE_DEF S true
RED_DEF S false
WHI_RED S disconnected
WHI_GRE S connected

colorless supports 8 colors, red(RED), yellow(YEL), blue(BLU), green(GRE), magenta(MAG), cyan(CYA), white(WHI), black(BLA) and the default terminal color (DEF). Color definitions take the form XXX_YYY, where XXX is the foreground color and YYY is the background color.

The second part of the configure takes the following form

<Color> <S or F> <Regular Expression>

'Color' and 'Regular Expression' should be self explanitor, which just leaves S and F needing an explanation.

F - F is for Full.
    If a match for the regular expression is found, color the whole line
S - S is for Sub.
    If a match for the regular expression is found, color the matching string only

Quick Start

After checking out the code

cd src
./configure --prefix=$HOME/my/bin
make
make install

After it has built, you can test it by

# assuming you where in the src directory
cd ..
cd examples
$HOME/my/bin/less example.txt

if everything worked out you should see an output that matches the example 'After'.

Limitations

• The code has been designed to work on linux; it may work on mac, but not in windows - sorry
• you'll need a compiler that has c++ 14 support (The main colorizing logic has been written in C++)
• Currently, the binary produced is named less. Take care if you are running make install with sudo rights. I'll change the name in the future
• My knowledge of make and Makefiles is poor so I may have done things that don't work for you. Let me know and I'll try to fix it up.

Problems ?

If you encounter any issues please report it using the issues tab