chalk

What is chalk?

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.

What are chalk's main functionalities?

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!}`);

Other packages similar to chalk

colors

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.

cli-color

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.

ansi-styles

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.

ink

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.

README

Terminal string styling done right

Info

• Why not switch to a smaller coloring package?
• See yoctocolors for a smaller alternative

Highlights

• Expressive API
• Highly performant
• No dependencies
• Ability to nest styles
• 256/Truecolor color support
• Auto-detects color support
• Doesn't extend String.prototype
• Clean and focused
• Actively maintained
• Used by ~115,000 packages as of July 4, 2024

Install

npm 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.

Usage

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'

API

chalk.<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.

chalk.level

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)

supportsColor

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 and supportsColorStderr

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.

modifierNames, foregroundColorNames, backgroundColorNames, and colorNames

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

Styles

Modifiers

• 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.

Colors

• black
• red
• green
• yellow
• blue
• magenta
• cyan
• white
• blackBright (alias: gray, grey)
• redBright
• greenBright
• yellowBright
• blueBright
• magentaBright
• cyanBright
• whiteBright

Background colors

• bgBlack
• bgRed
• bgGreen
• bgYellow
• bgBlue
• bgMagenta
• bgCyan
• bgWhite
• bgBlackBright (alias: bgGray, bgGrey)
• bgRedBright
• bgGreenBright
• bgYellowBright
• bgBlueBright
• bgMagentaBright
• bgCyanBright
• bgWhiteBright

256 and Truecolor color support

Chalk 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')

Browser support

Since Chrome 69, ANSI escape codes are natively supported in the developer console.

Windows

If you're on Windows, do yourself a favor and use Windows Terminal instead of cmd.exe.

FAQ

Why not switch to a smaller coloring package?

Chalk may be larger, but there is a reason for that. It offers a more user-friendly API, well-documented types, supports millions of colors, and covers edge cases that smaller alternatives miss. Chalk is mature, reliable, and built to last.

But beyond the technical aspects, there's something more critical: trust and long-term maintenance. I have been active in open source for over a decade, and I'm committed to keeping Chalk maintained. Smaller packages might seem appealing now, but there's no guarantee they will be around for the long term, or that they won't become malicious over time.

Chalk is also likely already in your dependency tree (since 100K+ packages depend on it), so switching won’t save space—in fact, it might increase it. npm deduplicates dependencies, so multiple Chalk instances turn into one, but adding another package alongside it will increase your overall size.

If the goal is to clean up the ecosystem, switching away from Chalk won’t even make a dent. The real problem lies with packages that have very deep dependency trees (for example, those including a lot of polyfills). Chalk has no dependencies. It's better to focus on impactful changes rather than minor optimizations.

If absolute package size is important to you, I also maintain yoctocolors, one of the smallest color packages out there.

- Sindre

But the smaller coloring package has benchmarks showing it is faster

Micro-benchmarks are flawed because they measure performance in unrealistic, isolated scenarios, often giving a distorted view of real-world performance. Don't believe marketing fluff. All the coloring packages are more than fast enough.

Related

• chalk-template - Tagged template literals support for this module
• chalk-cli - CLI for this module
• ansi-styles - ANSI escape codes for styling strings in the terminal
• supports-color - Detect whether a terminal supports color
• strip-ansi - Strip ANSI escape codes
• strip-ansi-stream - Strip ANSI escape codes from a stream
• has-ansi - Check if a string has ANSI escape codes
• ansi-regex - Regular expression for matching ANSI escape codes
• wrap-ansi - Wordwrap a string with ANSI escape codes
• slice-ansi - Slice a string with ANSI escape codes
• color-convert - Converts colors between different models
• chalk-animation - Animate strings in the terminal
• gradient-string - Apply color gradients to strings
• chalk-pipe - Create chalk style schemes with simpler style strings
• terminal-link - Create clickable links in the terminal

Maintainers

• Sindre Sorhus
• Josh Junon