Headway

An easier way to display styled text in the terminal.

What about the other?

The most popular node color modules are chalk and color.js.

These modules are very good and I have used them in the past but headway takes a slightly different approach. To illustrate this, lets compare examples of all three printing the same thing.

// chalk
console.log(chalk.red(err) + chalk.yellow(": Some description string"));
// colors.js
console.log(chalk.red(err) + chalk.yellow(": Some description string"));
console.log(err.red + ": Some description string".yellow);
// headway
headway.log('{red}' + err + '{yellow}: Some description string');

The choice is personal preference and with short strings the benefits are slim. Headway shines when displaying a large amount of styled text because there is no need for manual parsing to construct the final string. Styles are declared within the string itself.

How

Instead of console.log use hw.log with special string formatters.

Note: if you want to print with no newLine char use hw.log(string, false) instead

var hw = require('headway');
 
hw.log("{_cyan_}{white}Green works{/}\n{red}And it's now it's red")
 
var arr = ['{black}{_yellow_}String 1', '{green}{_underline}String 2']
hw.log(arr, false);

Formatters

• normal changes the text color
• _twoDash_ changes the background color
• _singleDash changes the text style (bold, underline etc)

All must be included in {} within the string.

Resetting

Use one of the special reset characters {/} or {reset} to change the all styles back to default.

You can omit this if you are just changing one style. For example, if you are changing the text color from green to blue you can just do

hw.log("{green}Green text{blue}Blue text")