Colorful Text in Rails with ANSI Escape Codes

Ever wonder about how Rails produces those vibrant, colorful displays for RSpec and Logger?

Take a look at this piece of Ruby code:

puts "\e[32mHi"

🧐 'Hi' appears in dazzling green.

Here's the magic behind it: ANSI escape codes.

These codes were cleverly designed in programming languages to provide developers with a standardized way to control the format and appearance of text in terminal/console output.

When do we use this?

1️⃣ Enhanced Readability: ANSI escape codes make text more readable by allowing developers to change colors, styles, and backgrounds, ensuring that important information stands out.

2️⃣ Visual Feedback: These mystical codes offer visual cues to users, from progress bars to color-coded status updates.

3️⃣ Debugging and Logging: They help format debugging and logging messages, enabling developers to quickly identify the severity of issues based on text appearance.

4️⃣ Interactive Interfaces: ANSI escape codes make command-line applications more interesting by allowing them to create interactive user interfaces.

Where does Rails work its magic with these codes?

• RSpec
• Logger's Colorful Logs
• Colorful Console Output

Here is the bonus:

If you want to check where ANSI code exists in Rails feel free to reach out:

https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/6c9967f85ada90f8ca58e794a850e887ceb45132/activesupport/lib/active_support/log_subscriber.rb#L76

https://github.com/rspec/rspec-core/blob/1c662c35f91f33946fdfbed431878f4798f06f70/lib/rspec/core/formatters/console_codes.rb#L47

Till we meet next time. Happy Coding!!