Highlight CLI

@readwithai - X - blog - machine-aided reading - 📖⚡️🖋️

Highlight strings within streams of text.

Motivation

It can be useful to highlight text in output to make it easier to find. There are tools that can do this like grep and supercat but these aren't trivial to use. I wanted a tool that is trivial to use and install on machines.

Alternatives and prior work

It is surprising that there aren't tool that do this. Some tools come close:

• xpo provides similar functionality but I could not install it
• hhighligher does this - but it is written in shell and I did not find it easyer to install.
• grep supports highlighting. The settings for coloring is complete but difficult to understand and additional regular expressions need to be added to match all lines.

Installation

You can install hlcli using pipx:

pipx install hlcli

Usage

Highlight the sring one

echo "hello one three\ntwo\nthree\nfour\nfive\nsix" | hlcli 'one'

Match various expressions with different colors:

echo "hello one three\ntwo\nthree\nfour\nfive\nsix" | hlcli one --green two --yellow three four --red six

Here we highlight one in red (the default color), two in green, three and four in yellow and six in red

About me

I am @readwithai. I create tools for reading, research and agency sometimes using the markdown editor Obsidian.

I also create a stream of tools that are related to carrying out my work.

I write about lots of things - including tools like this - on X. My blog is more about reading and research and agency.