Colored Console

This project reenables colors in Xcode's console (with a limited palette). Just like this:

Installation

1. Add the font file named ColoredConsole-Bold.ttf in the repo via the Mac OS application Font Book.
2. Back to Xcode. Go to "Preference" ⇢ "Texts & Colors" ⇢ "Executable console Output", click the font icon below, then set font to "Colored Console Bold"

How it works

It's been nearly 3 years since the issue "Xcode 8 kills code colors" was raised on the venerable XcodeColors project. Since then we've been limited to using emojis to add color to our console.

Recently I wondered, has the answer been staring us in the face all that time. While Xcode doesn't allow styled text, it does respect colored glyphes such as 😊. That very ticket makes a bunch of suggestions for using them in the console.

ColoredConsole-Bold is a font, based on FiraMono-Bold which adds ligatures for enabling colored variants of the ASCII character set. Here's the default color range:

The 5 colors are enabled by suffixing the character with one of the Variation Selectors 6-10 (FE06, FE07, FE08, FE09 and FE0A).

Changing the colors

You can have different colors and modifier codepoints by changing and running ./colorify.pl. I have not documented this (yet).