LJ Tip: Supercat Text Colorizer
The application Supercat colors any input text based on the type of
file and a set of rules associated with the file type. The rules are
used to match strings found in the input text and can be specified
using simple characters or strings, regular expressions and special
time-formatting rules. Supercat is flexible and extensible; new file
types can be added without software development.
You can download Supercat (at the time of writing the latest version
was 0.5.3) at http://supercat.nosredna.net. Supercat is also available
in Gentoo's portage system and Ubuntu's to-be-released Hardy Heron.
Installing Supercat is fairly straightforward -- the only thing you
need to specify is the --system-directory 'configure' option. Once
installed, you can run Supercat on numerous files. For example:
$> spc file.c
This presents you with a colorized listing (similar to how Vim colors
text). Supercat tries to figure out the file type based on the file
suffix or, in the case of files with the extension .log, Supercat
removes the suffix and looks up the file name (e.g., error.log is file
type error). The user can explicitly override the file type on the
command line.
All rules for colorizing text are stored in files with names of the
form spcrc-ext, where "ext" is the file type. These files are stored
in the configured "system directory" or else your private ~/.spcrc
directory.
All rules for colorizing text are stored in files with names of the
form spcrc-ext, where "ext" is the file type. These files are stored
in the configured "system directory" or else your private ~/.spcrc
directory. For example, the rules for a C source code file in spcrc-c
might look like:
# HTML COL COL A N T CHARACTER, STRING or REGULAR EXPRESSION
########## ### # # # #############################################
Red red b ([a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9_]*)[[:space:]]*(
Yellow yel b (while|for|if|switch|main|return)[[:space:]]*(
Yellow yel b s else
Cyan cya s case
Cyan cya s return
Cyan cya s default
Cyan cya b [[:space:]]*(include)
Green grn (do)[[:space:]]*{
Green grn (break|continue)[[:space:]]*;
Magenta mag (int|char|short|float|double|long|unsigned)[[:space:]]
Blue blu b [^[:alnum:]_]([[:digit:]]+)
Yellow yel "(.*)"
Yellow yel <(.*)>
Magenta mag c :;
Matching is performed using the information in the pattern at the end
of each line in the configuration file. If a portion of a line matches
the pattern then the matching characters are given the specified
color. The type of matching is specified in the 'T' column and
defaults to REGEXP.
The other columns specify the video coloring attributes to the used.
"COL" indicates the console color; "A" is an optional video attributes
(e.g., bold, underline); "N" governs the number of times a match is
applied to a line. The "HTML COL" column is there because Supercat
supports outputting its colorized text in HTML format for viewing with
a Web browser.
Supercat provides flexibility and extensibility without requiring
programming. There are numerous other options and goodies that
Supercat has to offer, but I'll let you find them as they are
extensive and out of the scope of this short HOWTO.
--
Bharathi S