Grepresent

Pattern-matching text formatter for the commandline.

Designed to highlight text piped to STDIN, grepresent is great for locating different strings as they come out of grep.

Install it yourself as:

$ gem install grepresent

This will put a grepresent executable in your PATH.

Once installed, you can see grepresent in action by running the following command:

echo "ruby is a pretty cool language" | grepresent -f ruby red -f language yellow,on_blue,bold -f pretty underline,green

Help and usage is available with the following:

grepresent --help

The current version of grepresent reads data from STDIN and uses the -f switch to define a formatter. Basic usage is:

grepresent -f <pattern> <format>

pattern can be any string or regex. Format is a comma-delimited list of Term::ANSIColor format values. Each pair of pattern/format is called a formatter.

Because grepresent reads strictly from STDIN, all the following examples assume that you're piping something into it; for example:

grep -R def app | grepresent -f if bold,blue

You can specify any number of formats for a single pattern, as follows:

grepresent -f spike bold,yellow,on_blue

You can also specify multiple formatters in a single call to grepresent:

grepresent -f spike red -f unix green,underline -f windows black,on_blue

It's also possible to chain calls to grepresent:

grepresent -f spike red | grepresent -f unix green,underline | grepresent -f windows black,on_blue

Which would have an identical effect to the previous example.

The pattern is actually a regular expression, so if you wanted to format the output of a call to grep so that the filename at the beginning of each line is grey:

grepresent -f '^.+?:' white,on_black,dark

There is also a dry-run mode (-d or --dry-run) which gives a run-down of all of the formatters that have been defined along with a sample of what the formatter will render as.

If the option is used anywhere in the call, it will be treated as a dry-run.

Grepresent is not quite ready for prime time. Following are some limitations.

• All regexes are case-sensitive.
• There is no validation for formats, yet.
• There is some weirdness if multiple formatters overlap and it can cause unexpected results.
• It ONLY reads from STDIN. At some point I'd like to have an option to take a file
• The commandline usage is not set in stone and will probably change before the 1.0 release.
• Format files -- to define reusable formatter rules.
• Support for textmate/vim/etc syntax rule files?
• Change name of executable to be less to type? gpr?

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

Written by Spike Grobstein

me@spike.cx
http://spike.grobste.in
https://github.com/spikegrobstein

Grepresent is licensed under the MIT license. See LICENSE.txt file.