ANSI Terminal

Add this crate to your own project:

cargo add ansi_term

ANSI Terminal

This program depicts the use of ansi_term crate and how it is used for controlling colours and formatting, such as blue bold text or yellow underlined text, on ANSI terminals.

There are two main data structures in ansi_term: ANSIString and Style. A Style holds stylistic information: colours, whether the text should be bold, or blinking, or whatever. There are also Colour variants that represent simple foreground colour styles. An ANSIString is a string paired with a Style.

Note: British English uses Colour instead of Color, don't get confused

Printing colored text to the Terminal

use ansi_term::Colour;

fn main() {
    println!("This is {} in color, {} in color and {} in color",
             Colour::Red.paint("red"),
             Colour::Blue.paint("blue"),
             Colour::Green.paint("green"));
}

Bold text in Terminal

For anything more complex than plain foreground colour changes, the code needs to construct Style struct. Style::new() creates the struct, and properties chained.

use ansi_term::Style;

fn main() {
    println!("{} and this is not",
             Style::new().bold().paint("This is Bold"));
}

Bold and colored text in terminal

Colour implements many similar functions as Style and can chain methods.

use ansi_term::Colour;
use ansi_term::Style;

fn main(){
    println!("{}, {} and {}",
             Colour::Yellow.paint("This is colored"),
             Style::new().bold().paint("this is bold"),
             Colour::Yellow.bold().paint("this is bold and colored"));
}