$Id: README,v 1.9 2004/11/01 00:04:38 ianmacd Exp $

Introduction

Ever wondered why the output of your favourite UNIX/Linux commands is still displayed in black-and-white after all these years?

Ever had to search back through your scroll-buffer in search of gcc errors and salient information to tell you what went wrong with your program's execution?

acoc is a regular expression based colour formatter for programs that display output on the command-line. It works as a wrapper around the target program, executing it and capturing the stdout stream. Optionally, stderr can be redirected to stdout, so that it, too, can be manipulated.

acoc then applies matching rules to patterns in the output and applies colour sets to those matches.

Installation

Please see the INSTALL file, included with this distribution.

Configuration

Please see acoc.rd, acoc.conf(5) or acoc.html, included with this distribution.

Contributing

acoc is only as good as the configuration file that it uses. If you compose pattern-matching rules that you think would be useful to other people, please send them to me for inclusion in a subsequent release.

Likewise, if you make an improvement to the code, be sure to submit your changes to me, so that others may benefit from your work.

I particularly encourage people to work on making acoc work better with interactive programs, such as irb. Work is also needed to make pseudo-terminal handling bidirectional.

--
Ian Macdonald
ian@caliban.org