Terminal Text Styler

If you are building a command-line tool with Rust, you may find it useful to highlight output in a style to make it stand out. Doing so, simply means wrapping your text in the necessary ANSI escape codes.

For example:

RED='\033[0;31m'
NC='\033[0m' # No Color
printf "I ${RED}love${NC} Stack Overflow\n"

Source: StackOverflow

In Rust, we can just replace '\033' with the unicode "\u{001B}" (Source: StackOverflow).

So, we can switch to the desired color by placing the escape code to start that color in our text and end it by using the escape code for no color. That's all there is to it! So, to highlight our text in yellow, we can just do this:

let greeting = r"\u{001B}[0;31mHello, World!\u{001B}[0m";
println!("{}", greeting);

But, that's kinda clunky and hard to read. That's where this package comes in.

TerminalStyle

With the TerminalStyle struct, we can build a color by giving the ANSI escape codes or building out styles with the supplied enums.

use terminal_text_styler::{TerminalStyle, SGREffect, ANSIForegroundColor};

// Manual with codes
let yellow_manual = TerminalStyle::from(vec![0, 93]);

// Using enums
let yellow = TerminalStyle::new(vec![SGREffect::Normal], Some(ANSIForegroundColor::BrightYellow), None);
let no_color = TerminalStyle::new_empty(); // Initialize without input parameters for no color
assert_eq!(yellow.command(), "\u{001B}[0;93m");
assert_eq!(no_color.command(), "\u{001B}[0m");
assert_eq!(yellow.wrap("Hello, World!"), "\u{001B}[0;93mHello, World!\u{001B}[0m");

Now, when placed in a string (or by accessing the command method), a TerminalStyle instance will generate the ANSI escape code string:

println!("{}Hello, World!{}", yellow, no_color));

This is much better, but we can make it a bit easier. We can call the wrap method to wrap the given text in that color.

println!("{} Blah blah blah...", yellow.wrap("Hello, World!"));

Presets

For your convenience, TerminalStyle comes in with some static presets:

let yellow = TerminalStyle::bright_yellow();
let red = TerminalStyle::red();
// Etc...

StyledTerminalText

The StyledTerminalText struct builds on the wrap command to put the emphasis back on your text, not the color. The StyledTerminalText instance can then be placed right into a String (or turned into a String by accessing the output property):

use terminal_text_styler::{StyledTerminalText, TerminalStyle};

let greeting = StyledTerminalText::new("Hello, World!", TerminalStyle::bright_yellow());
assert_eq!(greeting.output(), "\u{001B}[1;93mHello, World!\u{001B}[0m");

Highlight Function(s)

The last step to making your code clean and easy is by just using the highlight convenience function to generate a StyledTerminalText:

use terminal_text_styler::{highlight, TerminalStyle};

println!("{} Blah blah blah...", highlight("Hello, World!", TerminalStyle::bright_yellow()));

Each style in the table above also has a unique highlight function:

use terminal_text_styler::{highlight_bright_yellow, highlight_red};
println!("This is {} and this is {}.", highlight_bright_yellow("highlighted in bright yellow"), highlight_red("highlighted in red"));