Crate console

console is a library for Rust that provides access to various terminal features so you can build nicer looking command line interfaces. It comes with various tools and utilities for working with Terminals and formatting text.

Best paired with other libraries in the family:

• dialoguer
• indicatif

Terminal Access

The terminal is abstracted through the console::Term type. It can either directly provide access to the connected terminal or by buffering up commands. A buffered terminal will however not be completely buffered on windows where cursor movements are currently directly passed through.

Example usage:

use std::thread;
use std::time::Duration;

use console::Term;

let term = Term::stdout();
term.write_line("Hello World!")?;
thread::sleep(Duration::from_millis(2000));
term.clear_line()?;

Colors and Styles

console uses clicolors-control to control colors. It also provides higher level wrappers for styling text and other things that can be displayed with the style function and utility types.

Example usage:

use console::style;

println!("This is {} neat", style("quite").cyan());

You can also store styles and apply them to text later:

use console::Style;

let cyan = Style::new().cyan();
println!("This is {} neat", cyan.apply_to("quite"));

Working with ANSI Codes

The crate provids the function strip_ansi_codes to remove ANSI codes from a string as well as measure_text_width to calculate the width of a string as it would be displayed by the terminal. Both of those together are useful for more complex formatting.

Unicode Width Support

By default this crate depends on the unicode-width crate to calculate the width of terminal characters. If you do not need this you can disable the unicode-width feature which will cut down on dependencies.

Features

By default all features are enabled. The following features exist:

• unicode-width: adds support for unicode width calculations
• ansi-parsing: adds support for parsing ansi codes (this adds support for stripping and taking ansi escape codes into account for length calculations).

Structs

AnsiCodeIterator	An iterator over ansi codes in a string.
Emoji	"Intelligent" emoji formatter.
Style	A stored style that can be applied.
StyledObject	A formatting wrapper that can be styled for a terminal.
Term	Abstraction around a terminal.
TermFeatures	Gives access to the terminal features.

Enums

Alignment	Defines the alignment for padding operations.
Attribute	A terminal style attribute.
Color	A terminal color.
Key	Key mapping
TermFamily	The family of the terminal.
TermTarget	Where the term is writing.

Functions

colors_enabled	Returns true if colors should be enabled for stdout.
colors_enabled_stderr	Returns true if colors should be enabled for stderr.
measure_text_width	Measure the width of a string in terminal characters.
pad_str	Pads a string to fill a certain number of characters.
set_colors_enabled	Forces colorization on or off for stdout.
set_colors_enabled_stderr	Forces colorization on or off for stderr.
strip_ansi_codes	Helper function to strip ansi codes.
style	Wraps an object for formatting for styling.
truncate_str	Truncates a string to a certain number of characters.
user_attended	A fast way to check if the application has a user attended.