hicol

Highlight or colour fields in standard input

You may specify fields to highlight with -f / --columns. By default, colors the first column. You may specify delimiter with -d, by default uses TAB as delimiter.

Caveats: This is a simple tool. It does not understand delimiters inside quoted strings (meaning usually CSV files with commas within quotes).

Examples:

$ hicol.rb -f 1,2,4 table.tsv
$ hicol.rb -f 2 --fg 20 --bg 255 data.tsv | less
$ hicol.rb --columns 2,3 data.tsv > output.txt
$ hicol.rb data.tsv data1.tsv
$ cat data*.tsv | hicol.rb
$ cat data.tsv | hicol.rb - data1.tsv

Usage:

 hicol.rb --help

Usage: hicol.rb [options] [files]
Highlight given columns of input. Columns and single bg fg pair may be specified

Specific options:
    -f, --columns 1,2,3              Column/s to highlight (index 1)
    -d, --delim S                    delimiter, default is tab
        --fg NUM                     Foreground color number 0 - 255
        --bg NUM                     Background color number 0 - 255
    -h, --help                       Highlight Columns of delimited data

Install

  Place hicol.rb in your PATH and preferably rename to hicol.

Issues:

Takes only one color combination, which is applied to all fields. Cannot take separate colors for different fields. I may not work on this. Feel free to send a push request or patch for that.

Now ignores a field that does not exist.

License