grc: More colorizing for terminal output

I really should have sifted through the titles I had waiting back in June, when I finished the alphabetical sequence, and plucked out all the colorizers. I’m still finding them, months later. Like sand in my shoes after going to the beach. 🙄

Here’s grc, which is a lightweight colorizer for common terminal commands.

 

grc works on the same premise as some others we’ve seen; there is a shortlist of commands it knows and can colorize, but beyond that you’ll need to roll up your sleeves.

For what I see in the Arch version, which installed color profiles to /usr/share/grc/, grc can handle configure, cvs, diff, dig, esperanto (?), gcc, ifconfig, irclog, ldap, log, ls, mount, mtr, netstat, ping, proftpd, ps, traceroute and wdiff by default. So as you can see, it isn’t limited to commands.

I was going to question the logic of a few of those additions — mostly ls — because they already have color options. But this is oh-so-lovely. …

Which just goes to show that there’s nothing that has been done, which can’t be possibly done better. Nice work.

If grc encounters something it doesn’t know, you get the program’s natural output, uncolored and as best I can tell, unchanged. So you might be safe using grc within an alias, and just calling for it as part of your daily routine. I like the idea of seeing that grc ls -lha all the time. … 😀

Diving into grc won’t cost you much in disk space either. The tarball is barely 25K, and even when packaged, you’re talking about possibly 27K, for example, for the Debian version.

What’s clear at this point is, I need to find a way to distinguish between programs like grc, which colorize specific output, and color filters that pluck out specific words and add color to them. Not like it would matter though, since I’d be the only one making that distinction. …