I built a zero-dependency terminal styling toolkit for Node.js

Abdullah — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 03:41:47 +0000

tired of staring at walls of plain console.log? i built termpainter to fix that.

it is a small npm package that gives your terminal output actual structure. semantic styles, boxes, badges, tables, timestamps, spinners. zero dependencies, full TypeScript support, works in Node 18+ and Bun.

install

npm install termpainter

what it does

semantic styles

instead of hardcoding colors every time, you call what you mean:

style.success('Build complete')       // ✔ green
style.error('Connection failed')      // ✖ red
style.warn('Disk usage at 87%')       // ⚠ yellow
style.info('Server started on :3000') // ℹ blue
style.muted('debug: cache hit')       // gray, dimmed

structured log output

any style method accepts an optional object as a second argument:

style.info('User created', { id: 123, role: 'admin' })
// ℹ User created
//   id    123
//   role  admin

boxes

box('Deploy complete\n3 services restarted\nAll checks passed', 'green')
box(style.success('done'))  // fully composable

spinner

const s = spin('Deploying...')
s.succeed('Deploy complete')
s.fail('Something went wrong')

strip

useful for writing styled output to log files without escape codes:

fs.appendFileSync('app.log', strip(style.info('Server started')) + '\n')

debug helper

style.debug('cache miss')  // only shows when DEBUG=1

why i built it

i kept writing the same boilerplate across projects. chalk for colors, manual icon prefixes, rolling my own box drawing every time. termpainter packages all of that into one small thing with a clean API.

it also respects NO_COLOR, CI environments, and non-TTY output automatically so your logs do not get filled with broken escape sequences.

DEV Community: Abdullah