Farben

Appearance

Coloring and Printing ​

Farben gives you a few ways to color text and print it. Here's when to use each one.

Picking a Color Format ​

Start with named colors. They're readable, short, and cover the basics.

rust
cprintln!("[red]Error! [green]Success! [yellow]Warning!");

Reach for ANSI256 when you want more variety but don't need exact control. A color chart is your best friend here.

rust
cprintln!("[ansi(208)]A warm orange. [ansi(27)]A vivid blue.");
cprintln!("Orange is an awesome way to use ANSI256 since named colors don't have them.")

Use RGB when you have a specific color in mind, like a brand color or a precise shade.

rust
cprintln!("[rgb(255,90,0)]Fancy Orange (TM).");
cprintln!("That orange looks [italic]fancy...");

TIP

When in doubt, named colors first. They're the most readable at a glance and work everywhere.

color() vs color_fmt!() vs cprintln!() ​

A confusing amount of choices that all do different things.

Use color() when you need the colored string itself, not just to print it. For example, passing it to a logger or building a larger string.

rust
let msg = color("[red]Something went wrong!");
log::error!("{msg}"); // This is not a Farben built-in.

Use color_fmt!() when you need to interpolate runtime values into a colored string and store it.

rust
let path = "/some/file.txt";
let msg = color_fmt!("[red]File not found: [/]{path}");

Use cprintln!() for everything else. It's the shortest path from markup to terminal output.

rust
cprintln!("[green]Done in {}ms.", elapsed);

TIP

cprint!() works the same as cprintln!() but without the trailing newline, useful when you're building output incrementally.

Idiomatic Ways to Bleed ​

Idioms, idioms. There's a ton of things that have their own idioms, even bleeding!

The main use case for bleeding is to separate printed text into multiple lines that share the same style. If that's not your use case for bleeding, I don't know what is.

To elegantly bleed appropriately, we declare the style first, and then let the text below use that style. Like the following:

rust
cprintb!("[italic blue]"); // Declare the style.
cprintb!("I'm blue and I'm italian. This is a description text yadda yadda, "); // Leading space for printing in-line
cprintb!("Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Consectur adipiscing elit. What does that mean? ");
cprintln!("Final description text uses `cprintln!` to finally reset the style.");

cprintln!("\nGuys, what did I miss?");

INFO

This is the idiomatic way to use bleeds. It doesn't matter if you use newlines or not, but declaring the style and then using an in-line print is the correct way.