[ANN] Fansi: a library for dealing with fancy colored Ansi strings

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Haoyi Li

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May 26, 2016, 3:39:08 PM5/26/16
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Fansi is a tiny library I wrote to make it easier to deal with colored text for display in the terminal. 
Inline image 1
It let's you easily apply or remove Ansi color codes to strings, or portions of them, and substring or split the colored strings according to their on-screen width. At the same time, it avoids problems with Ansi colors leaking "rightward" because you forgot to Console.RESET, and does all this efficiently with low memory use and high performance. 

This makes it very convenient if you are not just constructing Ansi colored strings for immediate printing, but also passing them around your program, splicing/manipulating them, or applying additional colors after-the-fact. These are things that are traditionally very error-prone to do with java.lang.Strings with Ansi codes embedded, but with Fansi they are quick and easy.

Fansi was originally the text handling library for the Ammonite REPL, now extracted into its own tiny library and published separately for people to use stand-alone.

Try it out; hope someone finds this useful!


Viktor Klang

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May 26, 2016, 3:50:15 PM5/26/16
to Haoyi Li, scala-user
What a lovely name for that library!

(This also gives me a lot of nostalgia from the time where I programmed MUDs, in C as it so were, but in any case!)

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Naftoli Gugenheim

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May 26, 2016, 11:08:48 PM5/26/16
to Haoyi Li, scala-user
...and he does it again! 😂


On Thu, May 26, 2016, 3:38 PM Haoyi Li <haoy...@gmail.com> wrote:
Fansi is a tiny library I wrote to make it easier to deal with colored text for display in the terminal. 

It let's you easily apply or remove Ansi color codes to strings, or portions of them, and substring or split the colored strings according to their on-screen width. At the same time, it avoids problems with Ansi colors leaking "rightward" because you forgot to Console.RESET, and does all this efficiently with low memory use and high performance. 

This makes it very convenient if you are not just constructing Ansi colored strings for immediate printing, but also passing them around your program, splicing/manipulating them, or applying additional colors after-the-fact. These are things that are traditionally very error-prone to do with java.lang.Strings with Ansi codes embedded, but with Fansi they are quick and easy.

Fansi was originally the text handling library for the Ammonite REPL, now extracted into its own tiny library and published separately for people to use stand-alone.

Try it out; hope someone finds this useful!


Matthew Pocock

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May 27, 2016, 5:28:35 AM5/27/16
to Naftoli Gugenheim, Haoyi Li, scala-user
This is a possibly complementary library I knocked up for colored and styled output. It supports ansii color codes for terminals, but also some other formats.

https://github.com/drdozer/ansi_color

Matthew
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Integrative Bioinformatics Group, School of Computing Science, Newcastle University

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