tstyle

tstyle is a bash utility that provides a simplified access to some of the tput formatting functions.

CLI is great and writing programs or scripts can be really satisfying. Formatting our outputs can help their legibility and improve their quality. However using escape codes directly is awful and can lead to unreadable and ugly hard-coded strings like \033[31mhello\e[0m, world.

This little utility is aimed to make output coloring and formatting easy.

Example

tstyle can get its input as an argument:

tstyle -f red "A *tout* le _monde_"

or from stdin if the argument is missing, so the following is also accepted:

echo "A *tout* le _monde_" | tstyle -f red

and both lead to the same result:

Note that if both stdin and argument are provided, tstyle will ignore stdin.

Usage

-h or --help will give you a complete usage instructions:

By default tstyle will print its argument with a trailing \n, you can use the -n option to avoid this behavior.

Of course special characters can be escaped so tstyle "hello, \*world\*" will print hello, *world*.

The -b <color> and -f <color> will add a background and foreground color for the entire output, so multiple colors means multiple tstyle calls.

Exit Status

Normal execution will terminate with 0 exit code, the same of printf which is called to print the output. If the parameter of -b or -f options is an invalid color or is missing, the script will print an error message to stderr and terminate with 1 status code. If the script is called with invalid parameters the help message will be printed to stderr and the exit status will be 64.