Nano Colors

A tiny and fast Node.js library to ANSI colors to terminal output.

Started as a fork of @jorgebucaran’s colorette with hacks from @lukeed’s kleur. See changes between Nano Colors and colorette.

• It is 4 times faster than chalk for simple use cases.
• No dependencies. It takes 5 times less space in node_modules than chalk.
• Actively maintained. Used in many big projects like PostCSS or Browserslist.
• Auto-detects color support. You can also toggle color mode manually.
• Tree-shakable. We use a dual ESM/CJS package.
• Supports Node.js ≥ 6 and universal Node.js/browser projects.

import { green, bold } from 'nanocolors'

console.log(
  green(`Task ${bold('1')} was finished`)
)

Benchmarks

Benchmark for simple use case:

$ ./test/simple-benchmark.js
chalk         10,242,983 ops/sec
cli-color        723,530 ops/sec
ansi-colors    3,604,458 ops/sec
kleur         13,086,656 ops/sec
kleur/colors  15,955,740 ops/sec
colorette     41,579,227 ops/sec
felt-pen      13,569,353 ops/sec
nanocolors    40,832,014 ops/sec
picocolors    41,452,209 ops/sec

Benchmark for complex use cases:

$ ./test/complex-benchmark.js
chalk          1,937,337 ops/sec
cli-color        310,769 ops/sec
ansi-colors      726,024 ops/sec
kleur          1,241,189 ops/sec
kleur/colors   1,685,363 ops/sec
colorette      1,867,842 ops/sec
felt-pen       2,211,771 ops/sec
nanocolors     2,693,805 ops/sec
picocolors     4,037,949 ops/sec

Library loading time:

$ ./test/loading.js
chalk          3.465 ms
cli-color     21.849 ms
ansi-colors    1.101 ms
kleur          1.628 ms
kleur/colors   0.508 ms
colorette      1.034 ms
felt-pen       0.405 ms
nanocolors     0.486 ms
picocolors     0.470 ms

The space in node_modules including sub-dependencies:

$ ./test/size.js
Data from packagephobia.com
chalk         101 kB
cli-color    1249 kB
ansi-colors    25 kB
kleur          21 kB
colorette      16 kB
felt-pen       10 kB
nanocolors     16 kB
picocolors     10 kB

Test configuration: ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9, Fedora 34, Node.js 16.10.

Replacing chalk

1. Replace import and use named exports:

   - import chalk from 'chalk'
   + import { red, bold } from 'nanocolors'

2. Unprefix calls:

   - chalk.red(text)
   + red(text)

3. Replace chains to nested calls:

   - chalk.red.bold(text)
   + red(bold(text))

Above changes can be applied automatically using codemod:

npx jscodeshift FILES -t https://gist.githubusercontent.com/gavrix/ff051941ad9a19c8ea3224f38c30bc9a/raw/09d81e93f880ecbc8f52dcf7819816c81e2ba340/chalk_nanocolors_transform.js

Individual Colors

Nano Colors exports functions:

Colors Background Colors Modifiers black bgBlack dim red bgRed bold green bgGreen hidden yellow bgYellow italic blue bgBlue underline magenta bgMagenta strikethrough cyan bgCyan reset white bgWhite

gray

Functions are not chainable. You need to wrap it inside each other:

import { black, bgYellow } from 'nanocolors'

console.log(bgYellow(black(' WARN ')))

Functions will use colors only if Nano Colors auto-detect that current environment supports colors.

You can get support level in isColorSupported:

import { isColorSupported } from 'nanocolors'

if (isColorSupported) {
  console.log('With colors')
}

Conditional Support

You can manually switch colors on/off and override color support auto-detection:

import { createColors } from 'nanocolors'

const { red } = createColors(options.enableColors)

On undefined argument, createColors will use value from color support auto-detection.