On the one hand, I can admire colormake for its simplicity.
On the other, that’s about all it does. I will grant that colormake does convert make’s output to something more readable, but I also have to admit that the color doesn’t do much to help me understand what make is saying. 😦
Calling colormake is not particularly different from using make itself; you can apparently use it in almost every case where make is used. Even asking for help with -h or --help sends that request straight through to make, and you’ll get make’s quick help listing.
Which means if you want guidance you have to go straight to the man pages. And for what I’ve seen, there’s only one flag you can give colormake, which specifies an exact makefile, as opposed to just Makefile, I believe.
colormake is in Debian and AUR, but I see some differences between the two that suggest the Debian rendition hasn’t been updated. The only colors I saw in the version yanked from Debian were white and cyan, but the AUR version pulls its source from Github and was much more colorful.
I feel obligated to mention that there is an identical (knockoff?) project in Daniel C. Jones’s namesake program, the main difference being the use of python, I believe. So hey — two-for-one today! 😀 🙄
Inconsolation 