colormake(1)

🌈 NAME

colormake — the color wrapper for make(1), bestie. It's literally in the General Commands Manual section, and it's giving glow-up for your build output. 💅

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✨ SYNOPSIS

colormake [ --short ] ...

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🎀 DESCRIPTION

okay so here's the tea 🫖 — colormake is a wrapper around make(1), and its whole entire job is to make reading the output easier by colorizing it. That's it. That's the gig. Your build logs go from "wall of gray sadness 😭" to "vibe-checked rainbow situation 🌈". No cap.

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💖 OPTIONS

• --short — this one tells colormake to truncate lines so they don't wrap. Short lines, clean vibes, no chaos scrolling off the edge. ✂️

Everything else? Every other option gets passed unmodified straight through to make(1). colormake is not out here editing your flags, she's just the messenger. 🫶

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🦋 USAGE

So you wanna make your makefile use colormake? Easiest slay: change the path at the top. Where it normally reads

#!/usr/bin/make

you change it to

#!/usr/bin/colormake

Periodt. 💅

Alternately — and honestly this is so low-effort it's iconic — you can just type colormake whenever you would normally type make when compiling programs. Same energy, more color. ✨

And the best part? colormake is also available using alternate names, which do extra stuff for you:

• clmake — enables piping through less 👀
• colormake-short — truncated output so lines do not wrap ✂️
• clmake-short — both of the above at the same time, the full combo meal 🍓

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🧚 FILES

The configuration files are Perl scripts included by colormake.pl. The default values are (from colormake.pl itself, fr fr):

# Some useful color codes, see end of file for more.
#
$col_black =        "\033[30m";
$col_red =          "\033[31m";
$col_green =        "\033[32m";
$col_yellow =       "\033[33m";
$col_blue =         "\033[34m";
$col_magenta =      "\033[35m";
$col_cyan =         "\033[36m";
$col_ltgray =       "\033[37m";

$col_norm =         "\033[00m";
$col_background =   "\033[07m";
$col_brighten =     "\033[01m";
$col_underline =    "\033[04m";
$col_blink =        "\033[05m";

# Customize colors here...
#
$col_default =      $col_ltgray;
$col_gcc =          $col_magenta . $col_brighten;
$col_make =         $col_cyan;
$col_filename =     $col_yellow;
$col_linenum =      $col_cyan;
$col_trace =        $col_yellow;
$col_warning =      $col_green;
$tag_error =        "";
$col_error =        $tag_error . $col_yellow . $col_brighten;
$error_highlight =  $col_brighten;

For use with gnome-terminal I have the following configuration in my $HOME/.colormakerc file:

$col_default =      $col_black;
$col_gcc =          $col_magenta;
$col_filename =     $col_blue;
$col_linenum =      $col_cyan;
$col_error =        $tag_error . $col_red . $col_brighten;

And here's where those files actually live, bestie 📂:

• /usr/share/colormake/colormake.rc — System-wide configuration file for colormake. 👑
• $HOME/.colormakerc — Personal configuration file for colormake. It's your room, decorate it how you want. 🎀

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💀 HISTORY

Not me about to tell you some lore: /usr/bin/colormake was formerly named /usr/bin/cmake but had to be renamed because of a name clash. 😭 Imagine the confusion. Anyway, she got a rebrand and she ate. 💅

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👑 AUTHORS

Bjarni R. Einarsson is the author of colormake. 🫶

This manual page was written for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution because the original program does not have a manual page.

This manual page was written by Joe Wreschnig <piman@sacredchao.net> and updated by Ludovic Rousseau <rousseau@debian.org>, for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others).

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⭐ SEE ALSO

• make(1)
• clmake(1)

iykyk 😌

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okay that's the whole page, bestie — sending you off with the official vibes: this was colormake(1), dated July 2nd, 2001, and it's been serving colorized build output ever since. go forth and compile, you absolute main character. 💖✨🌈