colorex: I might as well include them all

This randomized revisitation of the C section has been a veritable tapdance through colorization tools. If I had known I had so many, I would have devoted a whole week to them.

I have one more that starts with C, and then I’ll return to the entire alphabet, as determined by shuf and ls. And since I’m on a roll with colorizing tools, I might as well finish up with colorex.

A lot of the “shortcomings” I mentioned in clog are resolved in colorex. For example, it will, as you can see, colorize specific chunks or strings of letters, for as many times as they appear on a line. It can also bounce between colors even when they are exactly adjacent.

And most of colorex’s syntax is at the command line, so you can declare a color as you build the filter command. It also adds a blink code, underlining effects and bolding … only some of which is visible in a virtual console, but you get the idea.

clog had a very straightforward configuration style, but colorex will require you to be a little more adept at the command line. Expect to escape some of your more complex searches and/or regexes to make sure colorex understands what you want.

As an added touch, colorex has a randomization command, which will either surprise you with its results or drive you batty with the spattered color effects.

Not since toilet has there been such a commanding use of color on my lowly X41. …

I should mention that the random effects only seem to work on a full line. And out of fairness, I should mention that colorex doesn’t have the same degree of control over color — like red on purple text — that you can get quite easily with clog. Perhaps that will be in future versions.

In spite of those shortcomings, I’m more inclined to adopt colorex than clog, just because it feels like there’s a stronger sense of control with the former than with the latter. It may not offer the same range of controls and it might be a little more challenging to configure, but it definitely picks up what clog stepped over.