printc

With this plugin you can print any color within the rgb color space via an interface that is as simple as a regular print statement.

This simple tool provides an abstraction layer on top of terminal ANSI rgb escape codes, making the addition of colorized output to your functions, shell scripts, and/or interactive terminal in zsh a piece of cake. There is support for any of the colors which can be achieved via the form R G B, where R, G and B are any numeric value between 0 and 255, representing the red, green, blue color space values respectively. Users of this plugin are able to issue a printc statement, followed by the previous mentioned rgb values, followed by the text to be printed. There is also 36 built in colors which can be accessed via tab auto-complete. And there is support for bold, italic, and underline text.

Setup
Configuration
- Requirements
- Italics Setup
Usage
- Options
- General Structure of Command
Notes on Environment Setup and Script Usage

Setup

To use, add printc to the plugins array inside your ~/.zshrc file:

plugins=(... printc)

Configuration

Requirements

Your terminal emulator must support 256 color. If you want to leverage italic text, depending on your terminal emulator you will likely need to add support for displaying italic text. The process is very simple, and I'll include instruction on how to do so. As long as your terminal emulator supports, and is set up for 256 color, which almost all are now-a-days, you can use the color aspect of the plugin, even without the italic functionality.

At the least your TERM environment variable must be set as so:

export TERM=xterm-256color

It is possible that this is all that will be needed for the italic functionality to work as well. I do recommend trying and seeing if italics work. It it does not, just follow the simple steps below.

Italics Setup

Create a directory ~/.terminfo
Create a file inside ~/.terminfo called xterm-256color-italics.terminfo
Place the following contents inside xterm-256color-italics.terminfo exactly as they are shown:

xterm-256color-italic|xterm with 256 colors and italic,
sitm=\E[3m, ritm=\E[23m,
use=xterm-256color,

Inside ~/.terminfo run the command tic xterm-256color-italics.terminfo
Set your TERM environment variable as so:

export TERM=xterm-256color-italic

You can export TERM in your ~/.zshrc or ~/.zshenv or many other ways. If you're an iTerm2 user you can do it through the GUI terminal emulator settings there. It doesn't matter how you do it, as long as the TERM environment variable is set and exported to one of the above mentioned values, most likely the latter if you want italics.

As an aside, I have not tested this inside TMUX, but it should work there as long as the environment is set up to properly handle color and italics.

Usage

Options

Option	Function
-b	Bold
-u	Underline
-i	Italic
-C `color`	Specify built in color
-l	List built in colors
-n	No newline
-h	Display help page

General Structure of Command

printc [-b] [-u] [-i] [-n] <0-255> <0-255> <0-255> "Colorized Text to Display"
- This is the structure used when specifying a color with RGB values.
- Note the absense of quotes around the RGB numbers, this is required.
- Note the inclusion of quotes around the intended output, also required.
  - As usual double quotes will allow parameter expansion.
- The RGB values must come after any options, and before the intended output.
printc [-b] [-u] [-i] [-n]> -C <built in color> "Colorized Text to Display"
- This is the structure used when specifying a color that is built in to the plugin.
- Quoting the intended output is not required when using built in color options.
Options can be given in any order, and chained together, such as -buinC <built in color>, so long as built in color follows immediately after -C, and in the case of using RGB values, they must come after any options that are given.

Notes on Environment Setup and Script Usage

Immediately after setup, the printc command will be available to use interactively, or inside aliases and functions. You can create nice colorized, formatted text for your output. In order to be used inside ZSH scripts, you will need to make the printc tool available outside of your current shell. One easy way to do this is to add the following lines to your ~/.zshenv file.

fpath=($HOME/.oh-my-zsh/plugins/printc $fpath)'
ZSH=$HOME/.oh-my-zsh/'

The first line makes the plugin itself available to shells that are forked from your interactive session, and the second line is an environment variable provided by OMZ, which is referenced inside of the printc plugin, and therefore needs to be exposed to children shells who want access to the tool. This can be done manually, or there is an included script, called setup.sh which will set everything up automatically if ran. It only needs to be ran once.

And finally, any script that uses the printc command will have to include the line autoload -Uz printc near the top.

If you only want to use printc interactively, and/or inside functions and aliases, then the above environment setup is not needed.

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