Highlight and colorize text patterns in your terminal for easier readability.

highlight <PATTERN0> [PATTERN1...]

highlight [--filter COLOR,PATTERN] [--filter COLOR,PATTERN] ...

This program takes text via STDIN and outputs it with the given regex patterns highlighted in color. If no specific color option is provided, highlight will default to a pre-selected array of colors.

Example: cat logfile.txt | highlight --filter 'green,pass' --filter 'red,fail'

If your filter contains capturing parens, only the captured text will be highlighted. If this is not the behavior you want you can use non-capturing parens, or use the --full_matches param.

Highlight uses Vim style smartcase matching. If your filter contains a capital letter then matches are case-sensitive, otherwise they are case-insensitive. Options for --case_sensitive and --case_insensitive are available as overrides.

If your match pattern begins with a dash, you will have to use the --filter syntax so highlight can differentiate between a filter and a param.

Example: cat README.md | highlight --filter 'green,--'

Note: Patterns read from a file are one per line. If lines are tab separated, they use advanced --filter COLOR,PATTERN style syntax. Where the COLOR is the first column, one or more tabs, and then PATTERN.

Highlight requires a 256 color capable terminal. If you're still running a 16 color terminal this will probably look pretty ugly.

Highlight respects the NO_COLOR environment variable, as well as disabling color when piping to a file or another command.

Filters use the color of the ANSI numbers available in the term-colors.pl script in the extras/ directory. Alternately some colors can be defined as a string shortcut: red, blue, green, yellow, orange, purple, white, and black.

Color values can also use _bold (e.g., 165_bold) or on_COLOR background suffixes (e.g., 10_on_140, white_on_blue). True color hex values (#RRGGBB) are supported as well.

cat README.md | highlight colors? by 'pattern[\ds]?' filter case with '\bhighlight\b'

cat nagios.log | highlight --filter '11,\bWARNING\b' --filter '82,\bOK\b' --filter '196,\bCRITICAL\b'

cat messages.log | highlight --file /tmp/patterns.txt