A small library to print colored text to the console.

• Example
• Reference
• Installation
• ANSI256 Color Codes
• Development
  • Testing

LuaText should be compatible with LuaJIT 2.1, Lua 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, and 5.4.

A simple example to render an entire string in red on a black background, underlined:

local text = require("luatext")

local my_str = text
    .Text
    :new("Hello world!!")
    :fg(160)  -- red as an ANSI256 color code
    :bg({0, 0, 0}) -- black as an RGB value
    :underlined()

print(my_str)

Running this code will produce the following output:

You can also add substrings to your text. The substrings will inherit the formatting of the parent text. Thus you can for instance run:

local text = require("luatext")

local my_str = text
    .Text
    :new()
    :fg(text.Color.Red)
    :append(
      "Hello ",
      text.Text:new("beautiful"):underlined(),
      " world"
    )

print(my_str)

Which will produce a fully red string, with only the substring beautiful underlined:

A LuaText object can also be used as a standard string:

local text = require("luatext")

print("Hello "..text.Text:new("fading"):blink().." world...")

Which will print Hello fading world... with the word fading blinking.

For a full reference of the API, see the reference.

This library supports NO_COLOR.

This module is hosted on LuaRocks and can thus be installed via:

luarocks install luatext

Otherwise, since the module is fully self contained, one can also simply copy the luatext.lua into their project.

To get a list of ANSI color codes run:

curl -s https://gist.githubusercontent.com/HaleTom/89ffe32783f89f403bba96bd7bcd1263/raw/e50a28ec54188d2413518788de6c6367ffcea4f7/print256colours.sh | bash

You can setup a dev environment with the needed Lua version:

# launch shell with some lua version and the dependencies installed:
nix develop .#lua52

and then test with busted.