itrace

A configurable columnar terminal tracer for Rust.

Scope note — this crate was built for personal use in my own projects. It has no ambition to become a widely adopted library: there are far more mature and feature-rich crates in the Rust ecosystem for structured logging (e.g. [tracing], [log], [env_logger]). Maintenance is best-effort. That said, you are of course welcome to use it if it fits your needs.

Define any number of named columns with individual ANSI colours and widths using the #[itracer] proc-macro attribute. A typed entry-builder is generated automatically — one method per column — so call sites are concise and refactor-safe. Optionally integrates with [tracing_subscriber] as a drop-in event formatter (feature tracing). Log levels and colours can be tuned at runtime without recompiling via a TOML file in ~/.config/itrace/ (feature tracer-file).

Output format

 I  14:49:55.743834Z     myapp      eu-west-1    node-01    Server started
 ^  └──────────────┘  └─────────┘  └─────────┘  └───────┘  └────────────┘
 │      timestamp       col 1        col 2         col 3       message
 │
 └─ level badge (1 char, coloured background)
    I = green   W = orange   E = red   D = blue   T = pink

• The level badge and timestamp are always present.
• All other columns are user-defined.
• Columns whose value is not supplied render as blank spaces, preserving alignment of the columns that follow.
• Extra key=value pairs can be appended after the message.

Quick start

Add to Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
itrace = { version = "0.1", features = ["derive"] }

... TODO!

Minimum Supported Rust Version

1.85 (Rust 2024 edition).

License

Licensed under the BSD 3-Clause license.