Yes, you can! Adding colors to terminal output is possible. You already know it, from ls --color In this post I show you a script that does it, in a simple way. I don't have a full range of colors implemented, but you can find all here.
This is the sed-processed output given by Gcal. The original source looks like
As you can see, I used as identifiers XML-like expressions. At first I just used odd punctuation marks (@, &, %...), but I realised it was too hard to remember. The script:
#\bin\bash
TEMP=calendartemp
TEMP2=calendartemp2
cat > $TEMP
#Change for dark blue
sed -e 's/\33 .*<\/dblue>/\33 [1;34m& [0m/' -e 's/<\/dblue>//g' -e 's/ //g' $TEMP > $TEMP2
#Change for blue
sed -e 's/.*<\/blue>/ \33 [34m& [0m/' -e 's/<\/blue>//g' -e 's/ //g' $TEMP2 > $TEMP
#Change for dark green
sed -e 's/.*<\/dgreen>/ \33 [32m& [0m/' -e 's/<\/dgreen>//g' -e 's/ //g' $TEMP > $TEMP2
#Change for green
sed -e 's/.*<\/green>/ \33 [1;32m& [0m/' -e 's/<\/green>//g' -e 's/ //g' $TEMP2 > $TEMP
#Change for red
sed -e 's/.*<\/red>/ \33 [1;31m& [0m/' -e 's/<\/red>//g' -e 's/ //g' $TEMP > $TEMP2
#Change for dark red
sed -e 's/.*<\/dred>/ \33 [31m& [0m/' -e 's/<\/red>//g' -e 's/ //g' $TEMP2 > $TEMP
cat $TEMP > $TEMP2
sed -e 's/[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]./\33 [1m& [0m/g' $TEMP2 > $TEMP #White bold for hours
sed -r -e 's/[A-Z][a-z][a-z][0-9]{8,8}/\33 [33m& [0m/' $TEMP > $TEMP2 #Dark yellow for date
#Turn today's date into red bold
sed -e 's/.*<.*>/\33 [1;31m& [0m/' -e 's// /g' $TEMP2 > $TEMP
sed -e 's/ [0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9].*$/[1m& [0m/' $TEMP #White bold for header
rm $TEMP
rm $TEMP2
You may wonder what \33 is: it is an escape character. They are the ones that tell the terminal to output color. In emacs it appears as ^[ (but only as one character, not two!). To write them (sorry, I didn't find an easier method), open a terminal, write echo " then press Control-V followed by esc, then " > escape.txt and you'll have the escape character in escape.txt. You can open this file and copy-paste it where needed.
The script is used just as a pipe:
setmana.x | Colorise.sh
where setmana.x calls gcal as I showed in my previous Gcal post. Now I only use it in the Gcal output, but I will probably use it somewhere else.
Related posts:
Three dee (3-dimensional file system browsers review) Power to the command line Gcal: the ultra-powerful command line GNU calendar
4 Awesome Comments. Add Yours!:
Well done for working it out.
I encourage you to work on learning more sed commands.
For a start you can keep adding -e on the end so you can get rid of all those TEMP files
You can also use the construct -e 's!</red>!!g' to save all that escaping.
You've got blogger eating your <red> but there's also ?
sed -e 's!.*</red>! [1;31m& [0m!' -e 's!</?red>!!g'
:)
I knew the -e, but I didn't want a reaaally long line, I thought it was more instructive this way, with separated colors. I didn't realise blogger ate the first markup (it was to be expected, in fact, but I just saw a bunch of script and thought it was fine).
Later this week I'll change as you suggest, this way I can be sure blogger isn't eating anything.
And I will try to use sed more often, to avoid forgetting how to use it. There are probably a lot of uses I should be putting it to.
Hey mate, good article :)
I was doing some similar hacking tonight and found that you can avoid having to use that ctrl-v-esc hack to generate escape chars by using \o33 in your sed replacements.
e.g. sed -e 's/foo/\o33\[1;34bar\o33[0m/'
see here for details: http://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/sed.html#Escapes
hope this helps :)
Hey thanks!
I'll use this for my next escaping rampage. It was a little hard to work out the first time without this :/
Thanks for it, and for dropping by!
Cheers,
Ruben
Post a Comment