Pattern-matching text formatter for the commandline.
Designed to highlight text piped to STDIN, grepresent is great for locating
different strings as they come out of grep.
Install it yourself as:
$ gem install grepresent
This will put a grepresent executable in your PATH.
Once installed, you can see grepresent in action by running the following
command:
echo "ruby is a pretty cool language" | grepresent -f ruby red -f language yellow,on_blue,bold -f pretty underline,green
Help and usage is available with the following:
grepresent --help
The current version of grepresent reads data from STDIN and uses the -f switch
to define a formatter. Basic usage is:
grepresent -f <pattern> <format>
pattern can be any string or regex. Format is a comma-delimited list of
Term::ANSIColor format values. Each pair of pattern/format is called a
formatter.
Because grepresent reads strictly from STDIN, all the following examples assume
that you're piping something into it; for example:
grep -R def app | grepresent -f if bold,blue
You can specify any number of formats for a single pattern, as follows:
grepresent -f spike bold,yellow,on_blue
You can also specify multiple formatters in a single call to grepresent:
grepresent -f spike red -f unix green,underline -f windows black,on_blue
It's also possible to chain calls to grepresent:
grepresent -f spike red | grepresent -f unix green,underline | grepresent -f windows black,on_blue
Which would have an identical effect to the previous example.
The pattern is actually a regular expression, so if you wanted to format the output
of a call to grep so that the filename at the beginning of each line is grey:
grepresent -f '^.+?:' white,on_black,dark
There is also a dry-run mode (-d or --dry-run) which gives a run-down of all of
the formatters that have been defined along with a sample of what the formatter
will render as.
If the option is used anywhere in the call, it will be treated as a dry-run.
Grepresent is not quite ready for prime time. Following are some limitations.
- All regexes are case-sensitive.
- There is no validation for formats, yet.
- There is some weirdness if multiple formatters overlap and it can cause unexpected results.
- It ONLY reads from STDIN. At some point I'd like to have an option to take a file
- The commandline usage is not set in stone and will probably change before the 1.0 release.
- Format files -- to define reusable formatter rules.
- Support for textmate/vim/etc syntax rule files?
- Change name of executable to be less to type?
gpr?
- Fork it
- Create your feature branch (
git checkout -b my-new-feature) - Commit your changes (
git commit -am 'Add some feature') - Push to the branch (
git push origin my-new-feature) - Create new Pull Request
Written by Spike Grobstein
me@spike.cx
http://spike.grobste.in
https://github.com/spikegrobstein
Grepresent is licensed under the MIT license. See LICENSE.txt file.