⚠️ This repository is archived and no longer maintained.

The Go version of this project has been deprecated in favor of the new Rust implementation.

👉 Please use the actively maintained Rust version instead: https://github.com/EugenDueck/colorexp-rs

Colorexp

Colorexp is a command line tool that allows coloring of text matches from standard input with multiple colors, something that is not easy to achieve with tools like grep and less.

Colorexp

• uses the Go regexp format, as documented here.
• supports overlapping matches (the color for the last pattern that matches will be used)

Usage

Usage: colorexp [options] patterns...
  -f, --full-match-highlight    Highlight the entire match, even if pattern contains capturing groups.
  -F, --fixed-strings           Do not interpret regular expression metacharacters.
  -i, --ignore-case             Perform case insensitive matching.
  -h, --no-highlight            Do not color by changing the background color.
  -H, --only-highlight          Only color by changing the background color.
  -o, --only-matching-lines     Only print lines with matches (suppress lines without matches).
  -g, --vary-group-colors-off   Turn off changing of colors for every capturing group. Defaults to on if exactly one pattern is given.
  -G, --vary-group-colors-on    Turn on changing of colors for every capturing group. Defaults to on if exactly one pattern is given.

Examples

Basic Usage

• use the -h/-H options to only colorize the text, or only the background

Overlapping matches - last match wins

• all matches are colorized, and the color of the last match will be used

Capturing groups

• when using capturing groups, only the matched group contents will be colorized

Vary colors of groups in patterns

• when exactly one pattern is given, the default is to use different colors for each capturing group
  • in case of multiple patterns, the -G option can be used to enforce varying of the colors for each group

Use the same color for all groups of a pattern

• when multiple patterns are given, the default is to use the same colors for all capturing groups of a pattern
  • in case of a single pattern, the -g option can be used to enforce use of a single color

Installation

Homebrew on MacOS

brew tap EugenDueck/tap https://github.com/EugenDueck/homebrew-tap
brew install colorexp

All OSes

• Download a Release from https://github.com/EugenDueck/colorexp/releases

Build

go build colorexp.go