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7967 :: Custom colored output in Nim

• talaing (orginal) [2021-05-11T16:27:35+02:00] view original

  Hello everyone,

  I'm having a problem with printing colored output in Nim. I tried this:

  import terminal
  
  styledEcho(fgYellow, "This text is yellow")
  styledEcho(fgBlue, "This text is blue")
  styledEcho(fgRed, "This text is red")
  styledEcho(fgGreen, "This text is green")
  Run

  and it works fine. The only problems is that I don't want to be limited just to a few built-in colors.

  Does anyone know how to print custom colored text in Nim? Thanks.

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• PMunch (orginal) [2021-05-11T16:34:32+02:00] view original

  Well, first you obviously need a terminal capable of colours outside the pre-defined ANSI ones. Assuming you have one of those it's just a matter of outputting the right ANSI colour code with ansiForegroundColorCode.

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• cblake (orginal) [2021-05-11T16:38:46+02:00] view original

  The Nim stdlib styledEcho uses ANSI escape sequences which are sorta-kinda portable across many terminals. On most the color set is quite limited to 8 or 16 foreground and 8 or 16 background.

  Some terminals have added quite a bit more flexibility. xterm256 added 6*6*6 color cube (and grey scale) sometime in the 1990s. More recently xterm, st, alacritty, and I think kitty added "true color" where you can specify 2 hex digit (1 byte) RGB for 24 bit color. Assuming these terminal features will sadly make your code much less terminal portable

  Since only end users really know how much terminal diversity needs supporting, if you want to use beyond the basics, it is much friendlier to have run-time rather than compile-time configuration. There is some example code in cligen/humanUt and some example use cases & user-configurations in lc, procs, and hldiff

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• alexeypetrushin (orginal) [2021-05-11T17:03:41+02:00] view original

  Hmm I didn't knew about styledEcho and used my own colors :)

  You can define any color you want yourself

  proc green*(s: string): string = "\e[32m" & s & "\e[0m"
  proc grey*(s: string): string = "\e[90m" & s & "\e[0m"
  proc yellow*(s: string): string = "\e[33m" & s & "\e[0m"
  proc red*(s: string): string = "\e[31m" & s & "\e[0m"
  
  echo "The grass is " & "green".green & " and the sun is " & "yellow".yellow
  Run

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• talaing (orginal) [2021-05-11T17:27:49+02:00] view original

  Thank you for your help, I use this code:

  var ocean = "\t\e[38;5;38;23m"
  
  echo ocean, "hello!"
  Run

  It works perfectly, the only thing I had to do was to download Windows Terminal from Microsoft Store (it's much better in my opinion, both functionality and design).

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• NameUndefined (orginal) [2021-05-11T18:00:59+02:00] view original

  I got some basic colors if you want

  let
      red = "\e[31m"
      yellow = "\e[33m"
      cyan = "\e[36m"
      green = "\e[32m"
      blue = "\e[34m"
      def = "\e[0m"
  Run

  def is default

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• qqtop (orginal) [2021-05-11T22:23:17+02:00] view original

  You might find some more terminal color inspiration here if you are on linux

  https://github.com/qqtop/NimCx

  for lots off raw color constants to try see

  https://github.com/qqtop/NimCx/blob/master/nimcx/cxconsts.nim

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• PMunch (orginal) [2021-05-12T09:24:13+02:00] view original

  You can also have a look at termstyle if you just want simple styling.

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