= Ruby Paint {<img src="https://badge.fury.io/rb/paint.svg" />}[http://badge.fury.io/rb/paint] {<img src="https://travis-ci.org/janlelis/paint.png" />}[https://travis-ci.org/janlelis/paint]

Paint manages terminal colors and effects for you. It combines the strengths of *term-ansicolor*, *rainbow* and other similar projects into a simple to use, however still flexible terminal colorization gem with no core extensions by default.

== Features
* No string extensions (suitable for library development)
* Simple API
* Faster than other terminal color gems ({as of October 2015}[https://gist.github.com/janlelis/91413b9295c81ee873dc])
* Supports setting 256 colors (for capable terminals)
* Supports setting any terminal effects
* Fall-back modes for non-256-color terminals (<tt>Paint.mode</tt>), supported modes:
  * 256 colors
  * 16 colors (only ansi colors, combined with bright effect)
  * 8 colors (only ansi colors)
  * 0 colors (deactivate)

== Setup
Add to Gemfile:

  gem 'paint'

and run `bundle install`

In Ruby do:

  require 'paint'

== Usage
The only method you need to know is: <tt>Paint.[]</tt>

The first argument given to <tt>Paint.[]</tt> is the string to colorize (if the object is not a string, <tt>to_s</tt> will be called on it). The other arguments describe how to modify/colorize the string. Let's learn by example:

  Paint['Ruby', :red]           # sets ansi color red
  Paint['Ruby', :red, :bright]  # also applies bright/bold effect
  Paint['Ruby', :bright, :red]  # does the same as above
  Paint['Ruby', :red, :bright, :underline] # effects can often be combined
  Paint['Ruby', :red, :blue]    # the second color you define is for background
  Paint['Ruby', nil, :blue]     # pass a nil before a color to ignore foreground and only set background color
  Paint['Ruby', [100, 255, 5]]  # you can define rgb colors that map to one of 256 colors. Only supported on 256-color terminals, of course
  Paint['Ruby', "gold", "snow"] # Paint supports rgb.txt color names, note that the arguments are strings (:yellow != "yellow")!
  Paint['Ruby', "#123456"]      # html like definitions are possible.
  Paint['Ruby', "fff"]          # another html hex definition
  Paint['Ruby', :inverse]       # swaps fore- and background
  Paint['Ruby', :italic, :encircle, :rapid_blink, :overline] # probably not supported effects
  Paint['Ruby']                 # don't pass any argument and the string will not be changed

When you pass multiple colors, the first one is taken as foreground color and the second one defines the background color, every other will be ignored. To only change the background color, you have to pass a <tt>nil</tt> first. Effects can be passed in any order.

You can find more examples in the specs.

== Windows Support
For ANSI support in Windows OS, you can use {ansicon}[https://github.com/adoxa/ansicon] or {ConEmu}[http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/].

== More details about terminal colors and effects
Terminal colors/effects are set by {ansi escape sequences}[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code]. These are strings that look like this: <tt>\e[X;X;X;X;X]m</tt> where X are integers with some meaning. For example, 0 means reset, 31 means red foreground and 41 red background. When you tell Paint to use one of the eight ansi base colors as foreground color, it just inserts a number between 30 and 37 in the sequence. The following colors are available:

  :black, :red, :green, :yellow, :blue, :magenta, :cyan, :white, (:default)

When combined with the <tt>:bright</tt> (= <tt>:bold</tt>) effect, the color in the terminal emulator often differs a little bit.

Through special sequences it's also possible to set 256-colors, instead of 8, which is also supported by many - but not all - terminals. Paint automatically translates given rgb colors to a suitable color of the 256 available colors.

When using the <tt>Paint.[]</tt> method, Paint wraps the given string between the calculated escape sequence and an reset sequence (<tt>"\e[0m"</tt>). You can get the raw escape sequence by using the <tt>Paint.color</tt> method.

=== Effects
Also see {en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code}[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code]:

==== Often supported

  0) :reset, :nothing
  1) :bright, :bold
  4) :underline
  7) :inverse, :negative
  8) :conceal, :hide
  22) :clean
  24) :underline_off
  26) :inverse_off, :positive
  27) :conceal_off, :show, :reveal

==== Not widely supported

  2) :faint
  3) :italic
  5) :blink, :slow_blink
  6) :rapid_blink
  9) :crossed, :crossed_out
  10) :default_font, :font0
  11-19) :font1, :font2, :font3, :font4, :font5, :font6, :font7, :font8, :font9
  20) :fraktur
  21) :bright_off, :bold_off, :double_underline
  23) :italic_off, :fraktur_off
  25) :blink_off
  29) :crossed_off, :crossed_out_off
  51) :frame
  52) :encircle
  53) :overline
  54) :frame_off, :encircle_off
  55) :overline_off

== Paint.mode
You can choose between four ways to use <tt>Paint.[]</tt> by setting <tt>Paint.mode</tt> to one of the following:
* 256:   full support
* 16:    don't use 256 colors, but the ansi eight ones (combined with bright effect)
* 8:     don't use 256 colors, but the ansi eight ones
* 0:     don't colorize at all

Paint tries to automatically detect the proper value, please open an issue if <tt>Paint.detect_mode</tt> yields a wrong value for you.

== Random ANSI Colors
With 1.0, the :random feature was removed, because it interfered with the caching mechanism. If you still need it, you will have to workaround by generating random colors yourself, before passing them into the Paint method:

  Paint['Ruby', Paint.random]        # get one of eight random ansi foreground colors
  Paint['Ruby', Paint.random(true)]  # get one of eight random ansi background colors

== Utilities
There are some supporting methods available. You can get a <tt>p</tt> like alternative for calling <tt>puts Paint.[]</tt>:

  require 'paint/pa'
  pa "Ruby", :red, :underline  # same as puts Paint["Ruby", :red, :underline]

Another helper method is <tt>Paint.unpaint</tt>, which removes any ansi colors:

  Paint.unpaint( Paint['Ruby', :red, :bright] ).should == 'Ruby'

== Advanced Usage: Shortcuts
There is an extension gem available that allows you to define custom color shortcuts. See {SHORTCUTS.rdoc}[https://github.com/janlelis/paint/blob/master/SHORTCUTS.rdoc] for more information.

== J-_-L

Copyright (c) 2011-2016 Jan Lelis <http://janlelis.com>, released under the MIT license.

Mainly influenced by rainbow[https://github.com/sickill/rainbow] and {term-ansicolor}[https://github.com/flori/term-ansicolor]. Also see the list of contributors[https://github.com/janlelis/paint/contributors]
