sorenisanerd / grep

All the colours all the time

I was looking at the output "git log" one day and it dawned on me that it was using less and that it was showing colours. I'd never thought about less supporting colours before, but here we are.

I can't say how many times I've done grep foo bar and realized I want to page through the output, piped it through less and deep down felt a little sad that I no longer had the colours from greps output. No more.

Also, same thing if I'm e.g. doing grep this_one_thing | grep but_also_this_other_thing and I lose the highlights from the first grep. So frustrating. No more.

I shove this script in $HOME/bin/grep, set LESS=-R in my .bashrc and now grep and less have all the colours at all the right times. And when I'm piping the output someplace else, we skip the colours. Cool, huh?