yoctocolors 🌈

The smallest and fastest command-line coloring package on the internet

Check out Chalk if you want something more mature and comprehensive.

Highlights

• Tiny
• Fast
• Handles nested colors
• Tree-shakeable
• No dependencies
• Actively maintained

Install

ESM:

npm install yoctocolors

Or CommonJS:

npm install yoctocolors-cjs

Usage

import colors from 'yoctocolors';

console.log(colors.red('Yo!'));

console.log(colors.blue(`Welcome to the ${colors.green('yoctocolors')} package!`));

You can also import colors as named imports:

import {red, blue, green} from 'yoctocolors';

console.log(red('Yo!'));

console.log(blue(`Welcome to the ${green('yoctocolors')} package!`));

This package supports basic color detection. Colors can be forcefully enabled by setting the FORCE_COLOR environment variable to 1 and can be forcefully disabled by setting NO_COLOR or NODE_DISABLE_COLORS to any value. More info.

Styles

Modifiers

• reset - Reset the current style.
• bold - Make the text bold.
• dim - Make the text have lower opacity.
• italic - Make the text italic. (Not widely supported)
• underline - Put a horizontal line above the text. (Not widely supported)
• overline - Put a horizontal line below the text. (Not widely supported)
• inverse- Invert background and foreground colors.
• hidden - Print the text but make it invisible.
• strikethrough - Put a horizontal line through the center of the text. (Not widely supported)

Colors

• black
• red
• green
• yellow
• blue
• magenta
• cyan
• white
• gray
• redBright
• greenBright
• yellowBright
• blueBright
• magentaBright
• cyanBright
• whiteBright

Background colors

• bgBlack
• bgRed
• bgGreen
• bgYellow
• bgBlue
• bgMagenta
• bgCyan
• bgWhite
• bgGray
• bgRedBright
• bgGreenBright
• bgYellowBright
• bgBlueBright
• bgMagentaBright
• bgCyanBright
• bgWhiteBright

Prior art

Yes

Benchmark

$ ./benchmark.js
┌─────────┬────────────────┬─────────────┐
│ (index) │ library        │ ops/sec     │
├─────────┼────────────────┼─────────────┤
│ 0       │ 'yoctocolors'  │ '8,000,000' │
│ 1       │ 'colorette'    │ '8,000,000' │
│ 2       │ 'picocolors'   │ '8,000,000' │
│ 3       │ 'nanocolors'   │ '5,988,024' │
│ 4       │ 'chalk'        │ '4,807,692' │
│ 5       │ 'kleur/colors' │ '4,807,692' │
│ 6       │ 'kleur'        │ '4,784,689' │
│ 7       │ 'ansi-colors'  │ '2,178,649' │
│ 8       │ 'cli-color'    │ '585,138'   │
└─────────┴────────────────┴─────────────┘

See benchmark.js.

FAQ

What is yocto?

It was the smallest official unit prefix in the metric system until 2022. Much smaller than nano.

Related

• yoctodelay - Delay a promise a given amount of time
• chalk - Terminal string styling