colorette

What is colorette?

The colorette npm package is a Node.js library for colorizing text in the terminal. It provides a simple API to add colors and styles to console output, which can be useful for creating more readable and organized logs, command-line tools, and scripts.

What are colorette's main functionalities?

Text coloring

Colorette allows you to color text output in the terminal. You can use predefined color functions to wrap your text and make it appear in the specified color when logged to the console.

const { red, green, blue } = require('colorette');
console.log(red('This is red text'));
console.log(green('This is green text'));
console.log(blue('This is blue text'));

Text styling

In addition to coloring, colorette provides functions to apply various text styles such as bold, underline, and italic.

const { bold, underline, italic } = require('colorette');
console.log(bold('This is bold text'));
console.log(underline('This is underlined text'));
console.log(italic('This is italic text'));

Combining styles

Colorette allows you to combine multiple styles and colors for a single piece of text. This can be useful for highlighting important information or creating visually distinct messages in the terminal.

const { red, bold, bgGreen } = require('colorette');
console.log(bold(red(bgGreen('Red text on green background'))));

Other packages similar to colorette

chalk

Chalk is a popular npm package similar to colorette that allows for styling and coloring terminal text. It offers a chainable API and additional color options. Chalk is known for its ease of use and extensive customization capabilities, but it might be slightly larger in size compared to colorette.

ansi-colors

Ansi-colors is another npm package for coloring terminal text. It focuses on performance and is dependency-free. It provides a similar API to colorette but with a different implementation approach. Ansi-colors may offer better performance in certain scenarios.

kleur

Kleur is a lightweight alternative to colorette with zero dependencies. It offers a similar API for text coloring and formatting. Kleur is designed for performance and has a minimalistic approach, which might make it faster in some cases.

README

🌈Colorette

Easily set your terminal text color & styles.

• No dependecies
• Automatic color support detection
• Up to 2x faster than alternatives
• TypeScript support
• NO_COLOR friendly
• Node >= 10

Upgrading from Colorette 1.x?

Quickstart

import { blue, bold, underline } from "colorette"

console.log(
  blue("I'm blue"),
  bold(blue("da ba dee")),
  underline(bold(blue("da ba daa")))
)

Here's an example using template literals.

console.log(`
  There's a ${underline(blue("house"))},
  With a ${bold(blue("window"))},
  And a ${blue("corvette")}
  And everything is blue
`)

You can also nest styles without breaking existing color sequences.

console.log(bold(`I'm ${blue(`da ba ${underline("dee")} da ba`)} daa`))

Need to override terminal color detection? You can do that too.

import { createColors } from "colorette"

const { blue } = createColors({ useColor: false })

console.log(blue("Blue? Nope, nah"))

Installation

npm install colorette

API

<color>()

See all supported colors.

import { blue } from "colorette"

blue("I'm blue") //=> \x1b[34mI'm blue\x1b[39m

createColors()

Override terminal color detection via createColors({ useColor }).

import { createColors } from "colorette"

const { blue } = createColors({ useColor: false })

isColorSupported

true if your terminal supports color, false otherwise. Used internally, but exposed for convenience.

Environment

You can override color detection from the CLI by setting the --no-color or --color flags.

$ ./example.js --no-color | ./consumer.js

Or if you can't use CLI flags, by setting the NO_COLOR= or FORCE_COLOR= environment variables.

$ NO_COLOR= ./example.js | ./consumer.js

Supported colors

Colors	Background Colors	Bright Colors	Bright Background Colors	Modifiers
black	bgBlack	blackBright	bgBlackBright	dim
red	bgRed	redBright	bgRedBright	bold
green	bgGreen	greenBright	bgGreenBright	hidden
yellow	bgYellow	yellowBright	bgYellowBright	italic
blue	bgBlue	blueBright	bgBlueBright	underline
magenta	bgMagenta	magentaBright	bgMagentaBright	strikethrough
cyan	bgCyan	cyanBright	bgCyanBright	reset
white	bgWhite	whiteBright	bgWhiteBright
gray

Benchmarks

npm --prefix bench start

  chalk         1,786,703 ops/sec
  kleur         1,618,960 ops/sec
  colors          646,823 ops/sec
  ansi-colors     786,149 ops/sec
  picocolors    2,871,758 ops/sec
+ colorette     3,002,751 ops/sec

Acknowledgements

Colorette started out in 2015 by @jorgebucaran as a lightweight alternative to Chalk and was introduced originally as Clor. Our terminal color detection logic borrows heavily from @sindresorhus and @Qix- work on Chalk. The idea of slicing strings to clear bleeding sequences was adapted from a similar technique used by @alexeyraspopov in picocolors. Thank you to all our contributors! <3

License

MIT