Technicolor

A composable way to format and colorize text. For Oh My Fish.

Technicolor is a declarative DSL which provides a DRY approach to shell text colorization.

Function DSL

Each function does one, and only one thing, and is named accordingly to its duty, with a reduced character count whenever possible. All public DSL functions are ended by :.

Colorisation

You can make text coloured using tint:.

tint: red 'The London bridge is falling down!'
tint: 555 'The London bridge is falling down!'
echo (tint: red 'Error!') 'Something went wrong!'

Set a background color using bg:

bg: blue 'Violets are blue'
bg: 400 'Want some wine, sir?'

Use both via command substitution!

bg: red (tint: white 'You better read this text!')
tint: white (bg: red 'You better read this text!')

Stylization

Make text bold:

bold: 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog'

Output text verbatim, without adding newlines or trailing spaces using inline:

function oompa
  inline: 'Oompa Loompa '
  inline: 'doom-pa-dee-do '
  inline: 'I have another '
  inline: 'puzzle for you'
end

Sometimes you want to wrap text in a specific column. Use wrap:

function lorem
  wrap: 80 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur' \
           'adipiscing elit. Nulla in purus quis erat' \
           'aliquet tristique eget et risus. Pellentesque' \
           'eget leo id urna dignissim elementum quis ut' \
           'libero. Vivamus interdum at nunc sagittis cursus.'
end

What Technicolor fixes

Fish shell provides the builtin function set_color, which abstracts terminal text colorization in a orthogonal function.

Note that even using this abstraction, shell colors still continue to be stateful, so once you switch to a color you need to reset the changes manually. This fact makes producing beautiful CLIs a true nightmare:

function explode
  set_color --bold red
  printf "Error: "
  set_color normal
  set_color red
  echo "You can't explode"
  set_color normal
end

Using Technicolor it's possible to transform the above function into the one below:

function explode
  echo (tint: red (bold: 'Error:')) (tint: red 'You can\'t explode')
end

License

MIT © Derek Stavis et al