Color replacements when using --replace

[lydell]

ripgrep colors matches in red (by default). That's very useful.

When using the --replace option, I would find it very useful if the replacements were colored. Currently, nothing is colored (except file paths and line numbers of course).

Here's a screenshot showing what I mean:

And here's a text sketch:

$ cat test
exponential notation: 123e4
another example: 42e-10
$ rg '(\d+)e' --replace '${1}E' test
1:exponential notation: <color>123E</color>4
2:another example: <color>42E</color>-10

What do you think?

(By the way, thank you very much for ripgrep. It's excellent.)

[BurntSushi]

Agreed. I like it!

[okdana]

Maybe a new colour spec? So you could do like --colors 'replace:fg:red' (with the default being identical to the default match spec)?

[BurntSushi]

@okdana I'd rather not add a new color spec. We should just use the existing match spec. When -r/--replace is used, all matches are replaced, so there's never a need to distinguish between the replacement color and the match color.

[okdana]

Fair.

I was thinking there would be some cases where you didn't want colouring, like when your replacement affects the entire line, but on balance an additional colour spec doesn't really help you there. If you ever have a situation like that where don't want the colours, you'll still have to pass --colors to disable them, and if you're doing that anyway you can just as well turn off match.

I retract my suggestion