discoball is a tool to filter streams and colorize patterns. It functions somewhat like egrep --color, except that it can highlight multiple patterns (in different colors). Patterns are arbitrary ruby regexes that are matched against the entire line.

$ discoball [options] <pattern1 pattern2 ...>

where options are:

• --group-colors or -g: Color all matches of the same pattern with the same color
• --one-color or -o: Highlight all matches with a single color
• --match-any or -m: Only print lines matching an input pattern
• --match-all or -a: Only print lines matching all input patterns
• --help or -h: Print the help message

• Highlight instances of "foo" and "bar" in the text of myfile.txt:

  $ cat myfile.txt | discoball foo bar
  

• Highlight paths of processes running out of /usr/sbin/:

  $ ps -ef | discoball --one-color --match-any '/usr/sbin/.*$'
  

• I wrote discoball for use with Steve Losh's todo-list tool, t. I put tags on my tasks annotated with + (inspired by Todo.txt):

  $ t Make an appointment with the dentist +health
  

  When I list my tasks (using t), I use discoball to highlight the tags with different colors:

  $ t | discoball '\+\S+'
  

  I can even do some fancier stuff to list particular labels. I have the following function defined in my .bashrc:

  function tl() {
    if [ -z  "$1" ]; then
      t | discoball '\+\S+'
    else
      t | discoball -a "${@/#/\+}"
    fi
  }

  I can use this as follows:

  $ tl               # ~> Show the list of tasks, with tags highlighted
  $ tl health urgent # ~> Show only tasks tagged with 'health' and 'urgent'
  

  Demo:

  

The easiest way to get discoball is by using pip (or easy_install): $ pip install discoball.