Deprecated

DEPRECATED: Use picocolors instead. It is 3 times smaller and 50% faster.

The space in node_modules including sub-dependencies:

- nanocolors   16 kB
+ picocolors    7 kB

Library loading time:

- nanocolors     0.885 ms
+ picocolors     0.470 ms

Benchmark for complex use cases:

- nanocolors     1,088,193 ops/sec
+ picocolors     1,772,265 ops/sec

Old docs

A tiny and fast Node.js library to ANSI colors to terminal output.

import { green, bold } from 'nanocolors'

console.log(
  green(`Task ${bold('1')} was finished`)
)

Started as a fork of @jorgebucaran’s colorette with hacks from @lukeed’s kleur. See changes between Nano Colors and colorette.

Replacing chalk

1. Replace import and use named exports:

   - import chalk from 'chalk'
   + import { red, bold } from 'nanocolors'
   

2. Unprefix calls:

   - chalk.red(text)
   + red(text)
   

3. Replace chains to nested calls:

   - chalk.red.bold(text)
   + red(bold(text))
   

4. If you used template tag, then use the nanocolors-template:

   - import chalk from 'chalk'
   + import { colorize } from 'nanocolors-template'
   
   - chalk.yellow.bold`yellow {red ${"text"}}`
   + colorize`{yellow.bold yellow {red ${"text"}}}`
   

Above changes can be applied automatically using codemod:

npx jscodeshift FILES -t https://gist.githubusercontent.com/gavrix/ff051941ad9a19c8ea3224f38c30bc9a/raw/09d81e93f880ecbc8f52dcf7819816c81e2ba340/chalk_nanocolors_transform.js

API

Individual Colors

Nano Colors exports functions:

Functions are not chainable. You need to wrap it inside each other:

import { black, bgYellow } from 'nanocolors'

console.log(bgYellow(black(' WARN ')))

Functions will use colors only if Nano Colors auto-detect that current environment supports colors.

You can get support level in isColorSupported:

import { isColorSupported } from 'nanocolors'

if (isColorSupported) {
  console.log('With colors')
}

Conditional Support

You can manually switch colors on/off and override color support auto-detection:

import { createColors } from 'nanocolors'

const { red } = createColors(options.enableColors)

On undefined argument, createColors will use value from color support auto-detection.