A super easy console highlighter. Text goes in, color comes out. rad can be used to process the output of commands, or to highlight single files.

How it works

rad will read the file given with --file/-f, or stdin if omitted.

Highlighting is specified with re-usable colorer files. Colorer files are written in YAML. They contain a collection of rules like this:

"regex":
    fore: green
    back: black
    style: normal

or this:

regex: {fore: red, back: white, style: bright}

and are stored in ~/.rad/ by default. The simplest way to use rad is to give it the names of one or more colorers, like so:

$ echo "this is a test" | rad colorer1 colorer2

and all rules in the colorers ~/.rad/colorer1.yaml and ~/.rad/colorer2.yaml will be applied to the input text in order!

rad can also make these files for you interactively, using the --new/-n option:

$ rad -n
Colorer name for this rule: logs
Pattern to match: ERROR
Foreground color [white]: red
Background color [black]: 
Style [bright]: 

$ tail -f log.txt | rad logs

Colorer files will be appended to, so you can quickly build a colorer with a bunch of rules by running this a few times.

Roadmap

I plan on supporting the following in future releases of rad, while trying to keep the usage and syntax super-simple at the same time:

• Multi-line highlighting, using start and stop regexes (e.g. highlight between HTML script tags or in tracebacks)
• Support for syntax highlighting using Pygments by giving a lexer/formatter for a multi-line rule
• Support for 256 colors (using Fabulous...?)
• Other awesome stuff depending on how people want to use it