Fork Colours

A brand new, not another, special and fast Node.js library to ANSI colors to terminal output.

Started as a fork of @ai's nanocolors, which is a fork of @jorgebucaran’s colorette with hacks from @lukeed’s kleur.

Key features:

• This library was inspired by many other unique libraries
• It is faster than alternatives
• It is British friendly: Tiny Colours not Colors
• It is a fork of fork
• It is one-liner program
• Total files: 7
• Package size: 4.6 kB
• Unpacked size: 14.9 kB

Also:

• It is 4 times faster than chalk for simple use cases.
• No dependencies. It takes 5 times less space in node_modules than chalk.
• Auto-detects color support. You can also toggle color mode manually.
• Tree-shakable. We use a dual [ESM]/[CJS] package.
• Supports Node.js ≥ 6 and universal Node.js/browser projects.

import { green, bold } from 'forkcolours'

console.log(
  green(`Task ${bold('1')} was finished`)
)

Inspired by

• Nanocolors by @ai
• Colorette by @jorgebucaran
• Kleur by @lukeed
• Colors.js by @Marak
• Chalk by @sindresorhus
• And many more...

Real-time Benchmarks

Simple

Run node test/simple-benchmark.js
  chalk 27,865,695 ops/sec
  cli-color 320,071 ops/sec
  ansi-colors 1,454,343 ops/sec
  kleur 69,030,393 ops/sec
  kleur/colors 61,530,806 ops/sec
  felt-pen 21,725,908 ops/sec
  colorette 18,321,149 ops/sec
  nanocolors 7,978,665 ops/sec
  forkcolours 18,935,821 ops/sec 🚀

Complex

Run node test/complex-benchmark.js
  chalk 7,265,255 ops/sec
  cli-color 216,698 ops/sec
  ansi-colors 610,524 ops/sec
  kleur 11,316,157 ops/sec
  kleur/colors 11,019,217 ops/sec
  felt-pen 7,388,171 ops/sec
  colorette 1,487,709 ops/sec
  nanocolors 1,463,641 ops/sec
  forkcolours 1,537,279 ops/sec 🚀

Loading

Run node test/loading.cjs
  chalk 8.838 ms
  cli-color 47.355 ms
  ansi-colors 4.199 ms
  kleur 5.217 ms
  kleur/colors 1.824 ms
  felt-pen 0.715 ms
  colorette 1.515 ms
  nanocolors 0.917 ms
  forkcolours 0.763 ms 🚀

Size

Run node test/size.js
  chalk 101 kB
  cli-color 1249 kB
  ansi-colors 25 kB
  kleur 21 kB
  felt-pen 10 kB
  colorette 16 kB
  nanocolors 16 kB
  forkcolours 16 kB 🚀

Colorette

  Run node test/colorette-benchmark.js
  chalk × 6,570,253 ops/sec
  kleur × 10,115,512 ops/sec
  ansi-colors × 202,788 ops/sec
  colorette × 459,384 ops/sec
  nanocolors × 435,993 ops/sec
  forkcolours × 469,867 ops/sec 🚀

Replacing chalk

1. Replace import and use named exports:

   - import chalk from 'chalk'
   + import { red, bold } from 'forkcolours'

2. Unprefix calls:

   - chalk.red(text)
   + red(text)

3. Replace chains to nested calls:

   - chalk.red.bold(text)
   + red(bold(text))

API

Individual Colors

Fork Colours exports functions:

Colors	Background Colors	Modifiers
black	bgBlack	dim
red	bgRed	bold
green	bgGreen	hidden
yellow	bgYellow	italic
blue	bgBlue	underline
magenta	bgMagenta	strikethrough
cyan	bgCyan	reset
white	bgWhite
gray

Functions are not chainable. You need to wrap it inside each other:

import { black, bgYellow } from 'forkcolours'

console.log(bgYellow(black(' WARN ')))

Functions will use colors only if Fork Colours auto-detect that current environment supports colors.

You can get support level in isColorSupported:

import { isColorSupported } from 'forkcolours'

if (isColorSupported) {
  console.log('With colors')
}

Conditional Support

You can manually switch colors on/off and override color support auto-detection:

import { createColors } from 'forkcolours'

const { red } = createColors(options.enableColors)

On undefined argument, createColors will use value from color support auto-detection.