Mateusz Loskot :: hacking on, working out, living up

colormake on Mac OS X

25 May 2008 | mloskot

I have just discovered colormake utility - a simple wrapper around make to colorize its output.

colormake is really helpful for someone who heavily works in Unix shell environments to visually analyse messages generated during programs compilation. Simply, colors are used as another language for communication with a user, complementing letters printed out to the console. The colormake wrapper in combination with clean console fonts like Terminus serve as a great tandem in hacker daily job.

First, I started to use colormake 0.2 on Ubuntu Linux:

$ sudo apt-get install colormake

Next, I tried it on Mac OS X 10.5, though with no luck. Basically, because of subtle differences in Bash and format of GCC output messages. So, simple patch (colormake-0.2-mloskot.patch) is required to get colormake 0.2 working on Mac OS X. I’ve sent this patch to Bjarni - the author of colormake, so perhaps he will like to include it in next (0.3?) version. BTW, thanks to Bjarni for the colormake tool!

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