PastelEx 1.0.1

PastelEx

Highly inspired by the syntax of Pastel and Crayon. Without these libraries, PastelEx wouldn't exist. Tested on both Windows and Linux.

Inspiration

Adding ANSI color codes can be a confusing and challenging task to do manually. This library makes coloring or styling console output a very easy task.

How It Works

Using a simple syntax, like "My string".Pastel(Color.Red), wraps your string in a special Unicode character sequence that instructs the terminal: "This text should be colored." You can also do it manually, but using this library offers you a few more benefits: ease of use and automatic checks for terminal support of ANSI color codes.

Any Performance Benefits?

A string in C# is immutable, meaning you can't modify it once created. However, PastelEx is efficient enough to help you create a visually appealing console output without requiring a lot of memory allocation. PastelEx doesn't allocate any memory when you're not nesting colors. Below, you can see a benchmark with nested colors.

|   Method |        Mean |     Error |    StdDev |   Gen0 | Allocated |
|--------- |------------:|----------:|----------:|-------:|----------:|
|   Pastel | 2,551.55 ns | 38.065 ns | 35.606 ns | 1.2665 |    2656 B | <-- worst
| PastelEx |    25.78 ns |  0.550 ns |  0.715 ns | 0.0382 |      80 B | <-- best
|   Crayon |   453.23 ns |  8.953 ns | 12.254 ns | 0.6266 |    1312 B |

PastelEx performs the best in terms of performance and memory allocation!

Has It Been Tested?

The code itself is tested to ensure that it outputs colors and styles as the programmer intended. However, you should never explicitly call PastelEx.Enable()! For Windows, PastelEx automatically checks on the first use if the current terminal can display ANSI color codes. It tries to enable them if necessary; otherwise, it disables PastelEx to show non-colored output. Tested on both Windows and Linux.

NO_COLOR

This library checks whether the user has explicitly disabled ANSI color codes by adding an environment variable NO_COLOR with any value. If this environment variable exists, color output will automatically be disabled.