Fd: Colorize matched substring like grep

[milianw]

Thanks a lot for fd, it's a really neat utility!

I'd like to kindly ask for a small feature addition: Please colorize the matched substring similar to how grep does it. I.e. compare the following two:

fd --color=always something
fd --color=always something | grep --color=always something

Ideally, the colorization of the second command would also be used for the first command.

Thanks

[sharkdp]

Thank you for the feedback!

Please see #46 and #53

[milianw]

Too bad this was abandoned :'( I'll probably have to make myself a wrapper than that uses grep like above. Feel free to close this then if you don't want to implement this.

Cheers

[sharkdp]

I'm happy to discuss this again, if there is an interest for this feature.

I don't think the grep wrapper will work as expected because

1. grep will have to deal with the ANSI codes coming from fd - which will cause problems if you want to match across differently-colored segments
2. ANSI colorings can not be nested. When grep adds additional reset-sequences after the match, it will reset fd's colorization prematurely.

[milianw]

The grep works for me. I mean sure, it loses the highlighting in parts of the path. But that's not as important to me as actually seeing the matched substring.

If this feature would be built-in to fd, it could close the previous ANSI code, highlight the substring, then reopen the previous ANSI code. I have zero knowledge of your code base, so I can't say how hard this is. Conceptually, I would personally solve it by delaying the highlighting until right before the output is written. I.e. keep a stack of highlighted ranges and then just add ranges there. Once you highlight, you can use that data to output the ANSI colorings as needed and simulate the nesting.

[sharkdp]

That's essentially what the prototype in #53 does.

[milianw]

Then I hope you re-evaluate your decision to abandon that change ;-)

[epitron]

+1

[sharkdp]

I don't see any strong support for this, so I'm going to close this for now (sorry).

[epitron]

Noooooöooooo!