Set Up Color Output

Set Up Color Output from henrycatalinismith

ppl provides a system for configuring the output of many of its commands in a way that’s almost identical to git’s color output configuration. While not an essential piece of functionality, a small amount of color can go a long way towards improving your experience using ppl.

Personally, I try to rein in the temptation to go to town and assign a color to absolutely everything. My ~/.pplconfig simply colorizes all contact IDs in all output, highlighting them in cyan to maximize their visibility.

$ ppl ls
alice:  Alice  alice@example.org
bob:    Bob    bob@example.org
eve:    Eve    eve@example.org

Configuring ppl to colorize the output of ls like in the above example is extremely easy, and will be especially familiar to you if you’re already used to configuring git. Here are the exact config file contents necesssary to show contact IDs in cyan in the output of ppl ls.

[color]
    ls = true

[color "ls"]
    id = cyan

Simply add the above to your ~/.pplconfig, run ppl ls, and you should see contact IDs in cyan. If not, double-check whether you’re running an up-to-date version of ppl. This feature has been supported since 1.15.0, making it only about a month old at the time of writing.

Now that you know the basic gist of how to configure color, you’ll probably be glad to know that there’s some fairly extensive reference documentation for this functionality, including a list of supported colors and an example for each command which shows the full list of configurable text elements.

Got a tip or trick you want to share with the community? Want to add it to the core documentation, under your own name and with an attribution link? If you've got what it takes, just write it up and email me, or better still, send a pull request!