2012-02-18
Colormake resurrected
It's funny how little, neglected things are sometimes the most successful.
One of the most widely distributed, popular tools I've ever written is a trivial little perl script named colormake. All it does is make the output of "make", when compiling a C program, more colorful and a bit easier (or at least more fun) to read.
According to the copyright on the file, I wrote it back in 1999! At the time, I was working on porting a gigantic C++ code-base to Linux. That may have been the most boring job I've ever had - colormake was a little distraction that supposedly helped me scan the builds for problems. It's pretty cool that people are still using it, I wonder if that's the case for the C++ monster I was porting...
Colormake is available as a Debian package:
$ sudo apt-get install colormake
...
$ which colormake
/usr/bin/colormake
As it turns out, the Debian version is better than mine - it fixes some bugs and is just a better tool.
I just went through my e-mail and integrated all the fixes people had sent me over the years, and now I'm looking at the Debian versions and integrating changes they've made...
I may just end up copying the Debian code and calling that Colormake 1.0. :-)
