Rainbow extends ruby String class adding methods to wrap the string with ANSI escape codes.

Rainbow adds following methods to String class:

• foreground(color) (with color and colour aliases)
• background(color)
• reset
• bright
• italic (not well supported by terminal emulators).
• underline
• blink
• inverse
• hide.

Each of those methods returns string wrapped with some ANSI codes so you can chain calls as in example above.

Color can be one of following symbols:

:black, :red, :green, :yellow, :blue, :magenta, :cyan, :white, :default

If you have 256-colors capable terminal you can also specify color in RGB which will find the nearest match from 256 colors palette:

"Jolacz".color(115, 23, 98)
"Jolacz".color("#FFC482")
"Jolacz".color("FFC482")

For support on Windows, you should install the following gems:

gem install windows-pr win32console

If the gems aren't installed strings are simply returned unaltered.

Rainbow can be disabled globally by setting:

Sickill::Rainbow.enabled = false

It will be disabled by default if it detects that STDOUT is not a TTY.

gem install rainbow

require 'rainbow'
puts "this is red".foreground(:red) + " and " + "this on yellow bg".background(:yellow) + " and " + "even bright underlined!".underline.bright

You're probably wanting to add colour to your logs. To do so you must explicity enable rainbow because it will detect that STDOUT (ie: the log file) is not a TTY. To make things easy, create the file config/initializers/rainbow.rb and include the following:

require 'rainbow'
Sickill::Rainbow.enabled = true