mbornet-hl
commented
6 years ago Hi,
thank you for your mail. I didn't know "supercat". I've just had a quick look on it and I already see some differences :
- supercat is able to generate HTML colors while hl only generates colors for a terminal (it has mainly been designed to colorize text files or commands' output),
- supercat distinguishes fixed strings and regex, while hl only treats regex, as long as I remember (even if the user specifies fixed strings, i.e. with no meta-characters),
- it seems that supercat uses several configuration files while hl needs none to work : there are two known configuration files (/etc/default/hl and $HOME/.hl.cfg, the configurations in the 2nd one override those in the 1st one), and you can select configurations using their name (for example : hl --diff, or : hl --IP --MAC --IPv6), but you may use hl with command line options only,
- hl may be used to transparently colorize commands' output (i.e. you can type commands as you are used to do, but their output will nonetheless be colorized), while supercat doesn't seem to be able to do so (for what I've read about it in the documentation),
- hl may colorize differently standard output (stdout) and standard error output (stderr), using a specific configuration for each of them, while supercat doesn't,
- hl is able to colorize text between two markers specified with regexp,
so you can, for example, colorize text between
and , or between '{' and '}', and so colorize lines of text containing no matching regular expressions as long as these lines are encountered after the beginning marker, - hl has been conceived with the Unix philosophy in mind : simplicity of use, interconnection via pipes, a general configuration file for all users, which may be overridden by a user's specific configuration,
- I also understand (but I may be wrong) that the colorization used by supercat depends on the name of the file's extension or on the file or directory name, while the way hl colorizes only depends on explicit configurations or option arguments, and that's all I see for the moment.
I greatly appreciate the fact that the authors created a man page, and included some examples : that's also part of the Unix philosophy, and I thank them a lot for that !
Now, regarding what command the users will use if they have to use only one of these two commands (but why would they have to ???), I can't give you an answer : users must try both commands and they will then use the one that suits their needs, or the one they prefer. There will probably be two different populations of users depending on their needs and on their feeling with the command line interface of the commands.
Regards.
Martial Bornet
On 07/12/2018 09:55 AM, Shadab Zafar wrote:
Hi, I use supercat for doing the highlighting: http://supercat.nosredna.net/
It is also written in C (& uses regcomp) etc.
Have you compared your tool against it, and if so, what are the benefits (if any)
Knowing this will be helpful for people (who don't know much C) but want to decide which tool to use.
Thanks!
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dufferzafar
Hi, I use supercat for doing the highlighting: http://supercat.nosredna.net/
It is also written in C (& uses regcomp) etc.
Have you compared your tool against it, and if so, what are the benefits? (if any)
Knowing this will be helpful for people (who don't know much C) but want to decide which tool to use.
Thanks!