[lobster_johnson]

Not entirely sure of the feature overlap, but this seems to reinvent grcat and its frontend, grc [1], a little bit.

Grcat lets you configure commands with colour regexps. Then you just prefix the command with "grc", and it will colorize the output according the rules. It's useful to alias commands this way:

    $ alias make="grc make"

colout seems most useful when you are want to highlight arbitrary patterns independent of the command, eg. "tail some.log | colout ...".

[1] http://kassiopeia.juls.savba.sk/~garabik/software/grc/README...

[nojhan]

Indeed. Having to build configuration file for each command was a pain in the ass. Colout is better integrated in my shell workflow and shows that config files are not mandatory (but colout themes do just the same).

Plus, colout have a tons of additional features (256-colors mode, colormaps, etc.).

[lobster_johnson]

Really? grcat/grc's configs are very simple. For example, this is the config for colorizing diffs:

    regexp=^\+(.*$)
    colours=bold green
    count=more
    =======
    regexp=^\-(--.+$|[^\-].*$|$)
    colours=bold red
    count=more
    ========
    regexp=^\>([^\>].*|$)
    colours=bold green
    count=more
    =======
    regexp=^\<([^\<].*|$)
    colours=bold red
    count=more
    =======
    regexp=^@@ .* @@$
    colours=magenta
    count=more

I agree that colout works better for ad-hoc stuff.

You should consider inverting the way it's invoked, though, to be more like grc, otherwise you can't reliably use colout in an alias (as pointed out elsewhere in this thread).

[egonschiele]

Having just seen both utilities, colout looks very useful while grc looks like a PITA. I don't want to write configs for every adhoc command.

[lobster_johnson]

Yeah, grc is not for ad hoc utilities. It's meant to work with tools you use frequently, like make, diff, gcc, ping etc. where the syntax is known.

[nojhan]

It should not be too difficult to use the same config files in colout, btw.

[nojhan]

You can, it's just a matter of knowing how to write a function for your shell.

[nillian]

Exactly.

ls example in zsh:

  alias ls="ls -lph1 --color=always"

  function ls {
    /bin/ls $@ | colout [regex] colours
  }

This will pass all arguments after "ls" to the /bin/ls command. This also means you can keep your existing aliases clean and tidy for common params.

Remember to use the full path (or /usr/bin/env maybe) so that you don't create a recursive call to your function ;)

This doesn't deal with the situation of being unable to get the return value of the original command, but depending on your needs, this may not be an issue.

(edited for spacing)

[lobster_johnson]

I was referring to the exit code problem. Is it solvable?