The fastest command-line colouring package on the internet

Check out the alternatives for more packages like this.

• Tiny
• Fast
• Tree-shakeable
• No dependencies
• Actively maintained
• Supports NO_COLOR & FORCE_COLOR
• Supports bright colours
• Can be composed (WIP)
• Works in browsers
• Works on CommonJS

pnpm add @kytta/colours

import * as colours from "@kytta/colours";

console.log(colours.red("Yo!"));

This package supports basic color detection. Colors can be forcefully enabled by setting the FORCE_COLOR environment variable to 1 and can be forcefully disabled by setting NO_COLOR or NODE_DISABLE_COLORS to any value. More info.

• reset - Reset the current style.
• bold - Make the text bold.
• dim - Make the text have lower opacity.
• italic - Make the text italic. (Not widely supported)
• underline - Put a horizontal line below the text. (Not widely supported)
• overline - Put a horizontal line above the text. (Not widely supported)
• inverse- Invert background and foreground colors.
• hidden - Print the text but make it invisible.
• strikethrough - Puts a horizontal line through the center of the text. (Not widely supported)

• black
• red
• green
• yellow
• blue
• magenta
• cyan
• white
• blackBright (alias: gray, grey)
• redBright
• greenBright
• yellowBright
• blueBright
• magentaBright
• cyanBright
• whiteBright

• bgBlack
• bgRed
• bgGreen
• bgYellow
• bgBlue
• bgMagenta
• bgCyan
• bgWhite
• bgBlackBright (alias: bgGray, bgGrey)
• bgRedBright
• bgGreenBright
• bgYellowBright
• bgBlueBright
• bgMagentaBright
• bgCyanBright
• bgWhiteBright

Yes:

• yoctocolors by Sindre Sorhus. This is a fork of it.
• picocolors by Alexey Raspopov. As small as it can get.
• nanocolors by Andrey Sitnik. A fork of colorette with hacks from kleur/colors.
• colorette by Jorge Bucaran. The OG lightweight command-line colouring library.
• kleur by Luke Edwards. Supports nesting and chaining
• chalk by Sindre Sorhus. The most advanced of the bunch. Supports all RGB colours with graceful degradation, and more.
• ansi-colors by Brian Woodward. A (then) faster drop-in replacement for Chalk without the bugs of other libraries.
• cli-color by Mariusz Nowak. Supports 256 colours with some nice features added on top.

Probably chalk. But maybe not! See this graph for help:

This is outdated.

$ ./benchmark/index.js
┌─────────┬──────────────────┬──────────────┐
│ (index) │     Library      │   ops/sec    │
├─────────┼──────────────────┼──────────────┤
│    0    │ '@kytta/colours' │ '27.725.838' │
│    1    │  'yoctocolors'   │ '26.188.058' │
│    2    │   'nanocolors'   │ '17.240.092' │
│    3    │   'picocolors'   │ '16.857.757' │
│    4    │   'colorette'    │ '16.798.142' │
│    5    │  'kleur/colors'  │ '16.535.599' │
│    6    │     'kleur'      │ '10.393.367' │
│    7    │    'chalk@5'     │ '10.101.294' │
│    8    │    'chalk@4'     │ '9.207.347'  │
│    9    │  'ansi-colors'   │ '3.825.073'  │
│   10    │   'cli-color'    │  '806.073'   │
└─────────┴──────────────────┴──────────────┘

See benchmark/index.js.

© 2023 Nikita Karamov
Licensed under the MIT License.

Based on yoctocolors.
© Sindre Sorhus
Licensed under the MIT License.

This project is hosted on GitHub: https://github.com/kytta/colours.git