Fd: LS_COLOR

[nkh]

Hi,

Could you consider releasing an ls_color utility that does the coloring without the finding?

There is a perl ls_color but it does not work as advertised and is also slower

[sharkdp]

What exactly are you looking for? What would this utility do? How would you like to use it?

[nkh]

Today I use ls_color to color files I display, be it when I "find" them or "grep" for them in divers bash scripts.

the problem with ls_color is that it does half of what ls does, executables, link, ... are not colorozed properly.

I am thinking of a command line too that can be used in a pipeline of course. In a list of files to colorize and out colored files

A few options that I can think about is ':

take full path in and output either:

• fullpath and file name colored together
  
  
  
  • fullpath colored and only filename colored on the output
  
  
  • although I do not need it, but for completeness, output the input, the colored path, the colored file name in a columnized fashion so people can "cut" and pick what they want, and maybe even output the length of path without the coloring
  
  

the usual options, -0 -separator -a, etc...
and maybe:
-path_only
-name_only
-length (of non colorized element)
...

If you have everything at hand and want to do it, it would be nice, I'll otherwise write some perl module when I find time.

[tmccombs]

So if I understand correctly, this would mean factoring out the code to colorize output (including figuring out which color to use for what) into a separate library, and then build a seperate application that reads a list of files from stdin and then prints colorized output to stdout?

[nkh]

yes, like the ls_color command

[sharkdp]

Even though this is not really related to fd, I think that's a good idea. I also thought that the LS_COLORS-functionality could be useful to other tools. Writing a small utility on top of this library should be really easy.

[Peltoche]

Hi everyone,

I would also need this kind of lib for my project lsd (Peltoche/lsd#28). @nkh do you have started anything? If not I think I will propose a lib based on your code in the next days/week.

[nkh]

@Peltoche No I haven't as I use lscolor from https://github.com/trapd00r/File-LsColor which does most of what I want.

[sharkdp]

I have already started to work on this. I'll report back soon.

[sharkdp]

I have published a first version of the lscolors crate:

Repo: https://github.com/sharkdp/lscolors
Crate: https://crates.io/crates/lscolors
Docs: https://docs.rs/lscolors/0.1.0/lscolors/

@nkh This also includes a lscolors utility (which you can download here) that is quite fast (around 3µs per path for my LS_COLORS variable with ~300 entries)

@Peltoche I'd be very happy to get your feedback (best way would be the new repo). I'm very open to API changes and other suggestions.

[nkh]

@sharkdp good job, I have integrated it in my perl script and works like a charm.

Now my script gets a bunch of paths and splits them to color the path and the files separately, because I want both colors, but if a "path/file.ext" is given to lscolors, the whole thing gets colored like "file.ext". I don't know if it is what you want.

Another point, which may make is useful for more people is to accept input as arguments (in addition to) getting input from stdin.

[sharkdp]

Now my script gets a bunch of paths and splits them to color the path and the files separately, because I want both colors, but if a "path/file.ext" is given to lscolors, the whole thing gets colored like "file.ext". I don't know if it is what you want.

That is expected, for now. The library only provides a "get ANSI style for a given path" function. However, for the binary, we could think about supporting the fd-style of colorizing paths.

Another point, which may make is useful for more people is to accept input as arguments (in addition to) getting input from stdin.

Great idea => https://github.com/sharkdp/lscolors/issues/4

[sharkdp]

I'm going to close this ticket. Please post further feedback / feature requests as tickets in the lscolors repo: https://github.com/sharkdp/lscolors