beyondgrep
[RFE] Highlight match groups with distinct colors
Right now multiple match-groups blend together in the output, which makes it hard to decide whether your regexp works correctly. In fact, half a year ago I even spend some hours researching and asking on IRC for what in the end turned out to be confusion that could've been avoided had groups been highlighted with distinct colors.
Below is an example how it works in Emacs re-builder: the "no-group" match has one color, 1st group has another, and 2nd one yet another.
Just to clarify what you mean by groups, you're talking match groups in the regex? So that if you ack for ack '(foo)somethingsomething(bar)' that all the things that match foo would be one color and the others that match bar would be another?
Am I right in thinking that this would be more for debugging your regex than for normal usage?
Or are you thinking you'd have something like
ack '(thisfunc|thatfunc).+(thisarg|thatarg)'
so that you could look down the results and see the left pattern in blue and the right one in red?
If so, I think you might be looking for something where we can have multiple patterns --anded together, as we're discussing in #172. Does that fit more what you're looking for?
Well, it might be more useful for debugging (now that I think, indeed 80% of my work with ack is constructing the correct regex), however it shouldn't hurt the normal usage, and your last comment even shows an example with "OR" where it could be useful.