highlighter: Picking out letters, words, phrases

I’m not sure where I heard about highlighter, but I have a feeling it’s been on my list for a long time.

highlighter is a python program that behaves like a color filter. You could compare it with grep in some ways, but grep plucks out lines that match; highlighter just tweaks the color.

highlighter stays out of the way; if you just execute hl on its own, not much happens. You might have to pipe text through it.

That does make it convenient for some other applications though: Send the output of a program through highlighter to add some color to the original results.

We’ve seen this before, in colout and ccze (though that’s more for colorizing logs) and perhaps some others. One shortcoming that I found with highlighter is that it didn’t seem to work in a virtual console; all I got was text of the same color. I’m not sure why. 😕

This is not in AUR or Debian that I could find; you might have to install this manually out of git or with pip. Enjoy.