ccat/README.md

ccat

ccat is a file printing tool (like 'cat') which uses Regular Expressions to enable syntax highlighting.

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Features

• Support for 11 colors: Red, Blue, Green, Magenta, Cyan, Black, White, Yellow, Gray, Orange and Dark Blue.
• Adding more colors involves adding a line of code, then recompiling.
• Regex-color mappings are stored in configuration files.
• Uses the file extension to determine which configuration file to use.
• Highly extensible - to add a config file for an specific file type, name the file <extension>.conf.
• Support for printing line numbers with the -n flag.
• Statically linked Go binary - no runtime dependencies, config files are distributed along with the binary.
• Cross-platform

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Installing

If you have the go command installed, run make after cloning the repository.

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Getting Started

The config files are embedded within the binary. They will automatically be installed to the correct location (%APPDATA/ccat on Windows, ~/.config/ccat on UNIX) when the program is first run.

As written above, if provided a file with extension .example, the program will look for the config file named example.conf. If such a file doesn't exist, the file is printed out without any highlighting.

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Config Files

The config files are written in YAML. Each line has the following syntax:

"<regex>": COLOR

Note that the regex must be enclosed in double quotes, and the color must be capitalized.

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TODO:

• Allow user to define colors at runtime by reading RGB values from a config file.
• Allow users to provide a config file in the command-line, overriding the extension-based config file.
• Provide releases.