Colorize your rake output

I've been writing a lot of rake tasks lately. I like to have a lot of output (feedback) from my tasks, at least while I'm writing them. I have colors in my tests, but my output is really ugly, so I took some code from Chatte, - a simple chat application a friend (and awesome developer, btw) wrote for college- and made some modifications for it. Here's my module right now…

module Colors def colorize(text, color_code) "\033[#{color_code}m#{text}\033[0m" end { :black => 30, :red => 31, :green => 32, :yellow => 33, :blue => 34, :magenta => 35, :cyan => 36, :white => 37 }.each do |key, color_code| define_method key do |text| colorize(text, color_code) end end end # green "Hello" # => "\e[32mHello\e[0m"

Now, you just need to include Colors in your tasks and enjoy your life.

I know there's a colorize gem out there, but I don't like their syntax. I prefer Andres' approach much more, so maybe I'll turn this into a really simple gem. Do you think it's worth it?

Nicolás Hock Isaza

Ruby, Rails, Programming and Random Thoughts