colorls

A port of the famous ruby colorls tool to Crystal.

See also:

• Ruby colorls
• scalals

Motivation

I found the original colorls to be a pretty neat tool and was interested to start learning Crystal since they released v1.0, so I decided trying to port colorls would be a nice way to:

• learn about how colorls works
• learn about Crystal and its standard library
• figure out some of the pitfalls in translating a work from Ruby to Crystal

Performance

Another motivation is that I've been interested more recently in using high-level compiled languages to write command-line utilities in order to reduce the runtime dependencies. Just starting up a ruby interpreter and loading in some packages can be a pretty expensive task. Since a tool like colorls is designed for interactive use, it seemed like a good fit.

In limited testing on my development machine, I'm seeing a 30-50x speedup. Yay Crystal!

CAVEAT: Please take any anecdotal benchmarks with a grain of salt. Feel free to drop me a line and tell me what you see.

Installation

TODO: Come up with a procedure to install this and then write installation instructions here

Usage

This has only been tested with Crystal 1.0.0 w/ LLVM 10.0. YMMV.

compile with:

shards install
shards build

then:

./bin/colorls
./bin/colorls -l
./bin/colorls -1

Development

Test with

crystal spec

Build with

shards build

TODO / Bugs Fixed, Issues Completed

• [x] Wide unicode char support
• [x] Printing number-of-hardlinks (thanks @blacksmoke16)
• [x] Include Git Support (--gs)
• [X] Term-width support (now using term-screen shard)
• [ ] Port all tests from the Ruby version or build equivalent tests.
• [ ] All the special encoding features in the Ruby version dont exist here. Maybe unnecessary in Crystal?
• [x] Movement of the binary with respect to the /config directory containing the yaml config files may cause issues. (FIXED?)

Known Issues

• [ ] Clubbing together cmdline options doesn't work. Will need to use another cmdline option parser to make this happen.
• [ ] Colors do not display the same as the Ruby version because of difference in how x11 colors map to RGB values vs. the 256 color palette.

Long Term Goals

• [ ] Support for LS_COLORS environment variable
• [ ] Support for NO_COLOR

Contributing

1. Fork it (https://github.com/nanobowers/colorls/fork)
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request

Contributors / Attribution

• Ben Bowers - creator and maintainer