Deprecated

DEPRECATED: Use picocolors instead. It is 3 times smaller and 50% faster.

The space in node_modules including sub-dependencies:

- nanocolors   16 kB
+ picocolors    7 kB

Library loading time:

- nanocolors     0.885 ms
+ picocolors     0.470 ms

Benchmark for complex use cases:

- nanocolors     1,088,193 ops/sec
+ picocolors     1,772,265 ops/sec

Old docs

A tiny and fast Node.js library to ANSI colors to terminal output.

import { green, bold } from 'nanocolors'

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

Started as a fork of @jorgebucaran’s colorette with hacks from @lukeed’s kleur. See changes between Nano Colors and colorette.

Replacing chalk

1. Replace import and use named exports:

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

2. Unprefix calls:

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

3. Replace chains to nested calls:

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

4. If you used template tag, then use the nanocolors-template:

   - import chalk from 'chalk'
   + import { colorize } from 'nanocolors-template'
   
   - chalk.yellow.bold`yellow {red ${"text"}}`
   + colorize`{yellow.bold yellow {red ${"text"}}}`

Above changes can be applied automatically using codemod:

npx jscodeshift FILES -t https://gist.githubusercontent.com/gavrix/ff051941ad9a19c8ea3224f38c30bc9a/raw/09d81e93f880ecbc8f52dcf7819816c81e2ba340/chalk_nanocolors_transform.js

API

Individual Colors

Nano Colors 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 'nanocolors'

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

Functions will use colors only if Nano Colors auto-detect that current environment supports colors.

You can get support level in isColorSupported:

import { isColorSupported } from 'nanocolors'

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

Conditional Support

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

import { createColors } from 'nanocolors'

const { red } = createColors(options.enableColors)

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