Introduction

This is color50!

Created as a final project submission for Harvard University’s CS50P course, color50 is a package I designed to add a little extra flavor to standard output print statements. This is my first ever attempt at making a Python package from scratch, and I’m excited to share it with fellow Python developers and CS50 students.

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Motivation

Many programming courses focus on building fundamentals by creating projects at the command line. Every time I learn a new language, though, I always wonder why printing text in color is almost never covered in the learning process.

It seems simple in theory, right? Most modern shells display all sorts of key features with colorful text already, so it’s clearly possible. This train of thought sparked the idea for what eventually became color50: a Python library designed to make colorful terminal output more approachable.

Ultimately, color50 is a package designed to address the confusion and cryptic syntax that comes with ANSI color code sequencing. My driving motivation for working on the project was to make the code for printing colorful output more readable, more intuitive, and generally just easier to use.

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Brief summary

Below is a brief summary of the four modules contained in the color50 package, with key features highlighted accordingly:

• color module: Contains the Color class and associated logic.

  • Color class

• core_functions module: Contains four standalone functions designed to streamline color selection and usage.

  • rgb function

  • hexcode function

  • css function

  • colorize function (decorator)

• colorstr module: Contains the ColorStr class and associated logic.

  • ColorStr class

• constants module: Contains a series of string literal constants for use with ANSI color code semantics.