Barva

A lightweight (zero dependency - 1.7KB), tree-shakable library for terminal colours using tagged template literals.

"Barva" is the Czech word for colour.

Features

• 🎨 Simple API: Intuitive tagged template literals
• 🌲 Tree-shakable: Import only what you need
• ⚡ Performant: Optimized for speed with caching
• 🔗 Chainable: red.bold.underline
• 🪆 Nestable: red\Error: ${blue\Info}`
• 📦 Tiny: No dependencies, small package size
• 🛡️ TypeScript: Full type definitions included
• 👌 Environment aware: Respects NO_COLOR standard

Installation

Choose your preferred package manager:

# npm
npm install barva

# yarn
yarn add barva

# pnpm
pnpm add barva

# bun
bun add barva

Deno

import { red, bold } from "https://deno.land/x/barva/mod.ts";

Usage

// Import just what you need (tree-shakable)
import { red, green, bold, underline } from 'barva';

// Basic usage
console.log(red`This text is red`);

// With variables
const name = 'World';
console.log(green`Hello, ${name}!`);

// Chaining styles
console.log(red.bold`This is bold red text`);

// Nesting colours and styles
console.log(red`Error: ${bold`Important!`} This is critical.`);

// Combining background colours
console.log(red.bgYellow`Warning!`);

// More complex chaining
console.log(blue.underline.bgWhite`Styled text`);

Available Styles and Colours

Supported colors

Colours	Background Colours	Bright Colours	Bright Background Colours	Modifiers
black	bgBlack	blackBright	bgBlackBright	bold
red	bgRed	redBright	bgRedBright	dim
green	bgGreen	greenBright	bgGreenBright	hidden
yellow	bgYellow	yellowBright	bgYellowBright	inverse
blue	bgBlue	blueBright	bgBlueBright	italic
magenta	bgMagenta	magentaBright	bgMagentaBright	strikethrough
cyan	bgCyan	cyanBright	bgCyanBright	underline
white	bgWhite	whiteBright	bgWhiteBright
geay	bgGrey	greyBright	bgGreyBright

Controlling Colour Support

Colour support is automatically detected based on your environment. You can manually enable or disable colours:

import { setEnabled } from 'barva';

// Disable colours
setEnabled(false);

// Re-enable colours
setEnabled(true);

The library follows the NO_COLOR standard and will automatically disable colours if:

• The NO_COLOR environment variable is set
• You're in a CI environment
• STDOUT is not a TTY

Default Export

You can also import the entire library:

import barva from 'barva';

console.log(barva.blue`Hello!`);
console.log(barva.green.bold`Success!`);

// Check if colors are supported
if (barva.isColorSupported()) {
  console.log(barva.magenta`Colourful output!`);
}

// Disable colours
barva.setEnabled(false);

Browser Support

This library is designed for Node.js environments, but it can work in browsers with appropriate bundling. When used in a browser, colour enabling/disabling logic will fall back to always enabled since browser environments don't have the concept of TTY.

Bundle Size

Barva is designed to be lightweight and optimized for modern JavaScript applications:

Library	Minified	Gzipped	Tree-Shakable
picocolors	2.6 KB	0.8 KB	❌
Kleur	2.7 KB	1.1 KB	❌
⚡️Barva	3.9 KB	1.8 KB	✅
Colorette	5.2 KB	1.7 KB	✅
Ansi-colors	5.8 KB	1.9 KB	❌
Chalk	5.8 KB	2.1 KB	❌ (v4), ✅ (v5+)

Note: Sizes are for the entire bundled library file. Actual impact on your app may be smaller with tree-shaking

Tree-Shaking Support

Barva is fully tree-shakable, allowing modern bundlers like webpack, Rollup, and esbuild to eliminate unused code. For example, if you only import red and bold, other colours and styles won't be included in your final bundle:

// Only red and bold will be included in your bundle
import { red, bold } from 'barva';
console.log(red`This is red text`);
console.log(bold`This is bold text`);

To enable tree-shaking:

1. Use ES modules syntax (import rather than require)
2. Use a bundler that supports tree-shaking (webpack, Rollup, esbuild, etc.)
3. Ensure your package.json includes "sideEffects": false

Tree-shaking can significantly reduce your final bundle size in real-world applications.

Run Benchmarks Yourself

Want to verify the performance on your system? Run the included benchmark suite:

# Install dev dependencies first (choose your package manager)
npm install
# or
yarn install
# or
pnpm install
# or
bun install

# Build the library
npm run build
# or
yarn build
# or
pnpm build
# or
bun run build

# Run performance script
npm run benchmark
# or
yarn benchmark
# or
pnpm benchmark
# or
bun run benchmark

# Measure bundle sizes
npm run bundle-size
# or
yarn bundle-size
# or
pnpm bundle-size
# or
bun run bundle-size

The benchmark suite tests:

• Basic colour application
• Style chaining
• Nested styling
• Complex real-world usage patterns

See the scripts directory for the implementation details.

Profiling the barva code

In order to spot bottlenecks in the code, a profiling scripts is available in the /scripts directory: profile-barva.mjs. The easiest way to run this is:

yarn profile

You can also run the individual steps by hand, run the following commands:

# build the script
yarn build

# Run profiling and generate isolate log files
node --prof benchmarks/profile-barva.mjs 

# Combine the generated log files:
node --prof-process isolate-*.log > profile_output.txt

Development

A local cache with all npm dev dependencies exists in .yarn/cache see also: https://yarnpkg.com/features/caching

# add all dev dependencies
yarn 

License

MIT © Bjørn Wikkeling