Rainbow

About

Rainbow extends ruby String class adding methods to wrap the string with ANSI escape codes.

Features

Rainbow adds following methods to String class:

foreground(color) (with color and colour aliases)
background(color)
reset
bright
italic (not well supported by terminal emulators).
underline
blink
inverse
hide.

Each of those methods returns string wrapped with some ANSI codes so you can chain calls as in example above.

Color can be one of following symbols:

:black, :red, :green, :yellow, :blue, :magenta, :cyan, :white, :default

If you have 256-colors capable terminal you can also specify color in RGB which will find the nearest match from 256 colors palette:

"Jolacz".color(115, 23, 98)
"Jolacz".color("#FFC482")
"Jolacz".color("FFC482")

For support on Windows, you should install the following gems:

gem install windows-pr win32console

If the gems aren't installed strings are simply returned unaltered.

Rainbow can be disabled globally by setting:

Sickill::Rainbow.enabled = false

It will be disabled by default if it detects that STDOUT is not a TTY.

Installation

gem install rainbow

Usage

require 'rainbow'
puts "this is red".foreground(:red) + " and " + "this on yellow bg".background(:yellow) + " and " + "even bright underlined!".underline.bright

Rails Usage

You're probably wanting to add colour to your logs. To do so you must explicity enable rainbow because it will detect that STDOUT (ie: the log file) is not a TTY. To make things easy, create the file config/initializers/rainbow.rb and include the following:

require 'rainbow'
Sickill::Rainbow.enabled = true

Authors

Marcin Kulik
Xavier Nayrac