The chalk npm package is a popular library for styling and coloring text in the terminal. It provides an easy-to-use API for applying various text styles, such as color, background color, bold, underline, and more, to console output in Node.js applications.
Text color
Change the color of the text. In this example, the text 'Hello world!' will be printed in blue.
console.log(chalk.blue('Hello world!'));Background color
Change the background color of the text. Here, 'Hello world!' will have a red background.
console.log(chalk.bgRed('Hello world!'));Text styles
Apply text styles such as bold, italic, underline, etc. This code sample makes the text 'Hello world!' bold.
console.log(chalk.bold('Hello world!'));Combining styles
Combine multiple styles together. The text 'Hello world!' will be bold with blue text and a red background.
console.log(chalk.blue.bgRed.bold('Hello world!'));Composing multiple styles
Create reusable composed style functions. This creates an 'error' style that is bold and red, which can be used to print error messages.
const error = chalk.bold.red; console.log(error('Error!'));Template literals
Use tagged template literals for styling. This allows for more readable code when applying multiple styles.
console.log(chalk`{blue.bold Hello} {red world!}`);The 'colors' package is similar to chalk and allows for coloring and styling terminal output. Unlike chalk, 'colors' extends String.prototype to add color and style methods directly to strings, which some may find less clean than chalk's functional approach.
The 'cli-color' package provides similar functionality to chalk with a focus on performance. It offers a chainable API and additional features like column alignment and line width control, but it might be more complex to use than chalk.
The 'ansi-styles' package is a lower-level library that chalk itself uses. It provides ANSI escape codes for styling text in the terminal. It's more manual and less user-friendly than chalk but offers more control for those who need it.
While 'ink' is not a direct alternative to chalk, it is a React-based rendering library for interactive command-line apps that includes its own system for styling text. It's more powerful for building full CLI applications but is overkill for simple text styling.
Terminal string styling done right
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String.prototypenpm install chalk
IMPORTANT: Chalk 5 is ESM. If you want to use Chalk with TypeScript or a build tool, you will probably want to use Chalk 4 for now. Read more.
import chalk from 'chalk';
console.log(chalk.blue('Hello world!'));
Chalk comes with an easy to use composable API where you just chain and nest the styles you want.
import chalk from 'chalk';
const log = console.log;
// Combine styled and normal strings
log(chalk.blue('Hello') + ' World' + chalk.red('!'));
// Compose multiple styles using the chainable API
log(chalk.blue.bgRed.bold('Hello world!'));
// Pass in multiple arguments
log(chalk.blue('Hello', 'World!', 'Foo', 'bar', 'biz', 'baz'));
// Nest styles
log(chalk.red('Hello', chalk.underline.bgBlue('world') + '!'));
// Nest styles of the same type even (color, underline, background)
log(chalk.green(
'I am a green line ' +
chalk.blue.underline.bold('with a blue substring') +
' that becomes green again!'
));
// ES2015 template literal
log(`
CPU: ${chalk.red('90%')}
RAM: ${chalk.green('40%')}
DISK: ${chalk.yellow('70%')}
`);
// Use RGB colors in terminal emulators that support it.
log(chalk.rgb(123, 45, 67).underline('Underlined reddish color'));
log(chalk.hex('#DEADED').bold('Bold gray!'));
Easily define your own themes:
import chalk from 'chalk';
const error = chalk.bold.red;
const warning = chalk.hex('#FFA500'); // Orange color
console.log(error('Error!'));
console.log(warning('Warning!'));
Take advantage of console.log string substitution:
import chalk from 'chalk';
const name = 'Sindre';
console.log(chalk.green('Hello %s'), name);
//=> 'Hello Sindre'
<style>[.<style>...](string, [string...])Example: chalk.red.bold.underline('Hello', 'world');
Chain styles and call the last one as a method with a string argument. Order doesn't matter, and later styles take precedent in case of a conflict. This simply means that chalk.red.yellow.green is equivalent to chalk.green.
Multiple arguments will be separated by space.
Specifies the level of color support.
Color support is automatically detected, but you can override it by setting the level property. You should however only do this in your own code as it applies globally to all Chalk consumers.
If you need to change this in a reusable module, create a new instance:
import {Chalk} from 'chalk';
const customChalk = new Chalk({level: 0});
| Level | Description |
|---|---|
0 | All colors disabled |
1 | Basic color support (16 colors) |
2 | 256 color support |
3 | Truecolor support (16 million colors) |
Detect whether the terminal supports color. Used internally and handled for you, but exposed for convenience.
Can be overridden by the user with the flags --color and --no-color. For situations where using --color is not possible, use the environment variable FORCE_COLOR=1 (level 1), FORCE_COLOR=2 (level 2), or FORCE_COLOR=3 (level 3) to forcefully enable color, or FORCE_COLOR=0 to forcefully disable. The use of FORCE_COLOR overrides all other color support checks.
Explicit 256/Truecolor mode can be enabled using the --color=256 and --color=16m flags, respectively.
chalkStderr contains a separate instance configured with color support detected for stderr stream instead of stdout. Override rules from supportsColor apply to this too. supportsColorStderr is exposed for convenience.
All supported style strings are exposed as an array of strings for convenience. colorNames is the combination of foregroundColorNames and backgroundColorNames.
This can be useful if you wrap Chalk and need to validate input:
import {modifierNames, foregroundColorNames} from 'chalk';
console.log(modifierNames.includes('bold'));
//=> true
console.log(foregroundColorNames.includes('pink'));
//=> false
reset - Reset the current style.bold - Make the text bold.dim - Make the text have lower opacity.italic - Make the text italic. (Not widely supported)underline - Put a horizontal line below the text. (Not widely supported)overline - Put a horizontal line above the text. (Not widely supported)inverse- Invert background and foreground colors.hidden - Print the text but make it invisible.strikethrough - Puts a horizontal line through the center of the text. (Not widely supported)visible- Print the text only when Chalk has a color level above zero. Can be useful for things that are purely cosmetic.blackredgreenyellowbluemagentacyanwhiteblackBright (alias: gray, grey)redBrightgreenBrightyellowBrightblueBrightmagentaBrightcyanBrightwhiteBrightbgBlackbgRedbgGreenbgYellowbgBluebgMagentabgCyanbgWhitebgBlackBright (alias: bgGray, bgGrey)bgRedBrightbgGreenBrightbgYellowBrightbgBlueBrightbgMagentaBrightbgCyanBrightbgWhiteBrightChalk supports 256 colors and Truecolor (16 million colors) on supported terminal apps.
Colors are downsampled from 16 million RGB values to an ANSI color format that is supported by the terminal emulator (or by specifying {level: n} as a Chalk option). For example, Chalk configured to run at level 1 (basic color support) will downsample an RGB value of #FF0000 (red) to 31 (ANSI escape for red).
Examples:
chalk.hex('#DEADED').underline('Hello, world!')chalk.rgb(15, 100, 204).inverse('Hello!')Background versions of these models are prefixed with bg and the first level of the module capitalized (e.g. hex for foreground colors and bgHex for background colors).
chalk.bgHex('#DEADED').underline('Hello, world!')chalk.bgRgb(15, 100, 204).inverse('Hello!')The following color models can be used:
rgb - Example: chalk.rgb(255, 136, 0).bold('Orange!')hex - Example: chalk.hex('#FF8800').bold('Orange!')ansi256 - Example: chalk.bgAnsi256(194)('Honeydew, more or less')Since Chrome 69, ANSI escape codes are natively supported in the developer console.
If you're on Windows, do yourself a favor and use Windows Terminal instead of cmd.exe.
colors.js used to be the most popular string styling module, but it has serious deficiencies like extending String.prototype which causes all kinds of problems and the package is unmaintained. Although there are other packages, they either do too much or not enough. Chalk is a clean and focused alternative.
FAQs
Terminal string styling done right
We found that chalk demonstrated a not healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released a year ago. It has 2 open source maintainers collaborating on the project.
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