rednose is a nosetests plugin for adding colour (and readability) to nosetest console results.

easy_install rednose

or from the source:

./setup.py develop

nosetests --rednose

or:

export NOSE_REDNOSE=1
nosetests

Rednose by default uses auto-colouring, which will only use colour if you're running it on a terminal (i.e not piping it to a file). To control colouring, use one of:

nosetests --rednose --force-color
nosetests --no-color

(you can also set this in the environment variable NOSE_REDNOSE_COLOR)