12 ms·

How would you do colorization of matches outside of grep, other than reimplementing grep?

• blihp 8y ago
  By optionally emitting generic structural markup which you could then use to format via colorization (or whatever other means you wanted) in a terminal, a GUI, a web page, etc. That would have been more consistent with the 'one tool, one job' philosophy of Unix. So then you could do something along the lines of 'grep --emit-markup ... | colorize-markup' (completely made up switch and command names) and use aliases/environment variables/etc. so that to a user could type something like 'cgrep' to get colorized output.
  • markrages 8y ago
    but the structure generator and decoder would be so closely coupled they might as well be the same program. Alternatively, you could have grep take a list of colors from a config file or environment variable and blindly interpolate those strings to make colored output[1]. This also allows color to show up automatically for interactive use. [1] this is in fact how grep works.
    • hvis 8y ago
      That's not all one might want to do the structured out. Think of converting to HTML, as one example.
      • markrages 8y ago
        lsusb | grep --color=always Linux | aha > grepped.html
      • burntsushi 8y ago
        ripgrep does have a JSON output mode, if you're curious. Of course, ripgrep handles coloring like GNU grep does.