Technische Universität Wien
Orientation and Processing of Airborne Laser Scanning data
Department of Geodesy and Geoinformation - Research Groups Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing
By default, the opalsShell console uses a blue background for easier differentiation to the standard system console. For the OPALS release 2.6.0, colorization of messages of different types was introduced. This feature emphasizes errors and warning within the console window with different foreground colors and graphic mode (i.e. underlined).
As depited in Figure 1, the default color theme shows warnings in yellow and errors in red (both underlined).
The standard theme was chosen carefully but due to limitations of ANSI color definition, the displayed color may vary slightly from operating system, operating system version and console application.
Hence, the predefined color theme might be unsatisfactory in certain environments. Therefore, it is possible to customize the color theme and adapt it to the users' preferences.
OPALS uses the ANSI color codes for colorizing console messages which work on all operating systems. In principle, one can chose from 16 foreground and 16 background colors. Furthermore, it is possible to use different graphic modes (underline, blinking, etc.) as listed in Table 1.
| Color | Foreground | Background |
|---|---|---|
| Default | Esc[0m | |
| Black ▮ | Esc[30m | Esc[40m |
| Red ▮ | Esc[31m | Esc[41m |
| Green ▮ | Esc[32m | Esc[42m |
| Yellow ▮ | Esc[33m | Esc[43m |
| Blue ▮ | Esc[34m | Esc[44m |
| Magenta ▮ | Esc[35m | Esc[45m |
| Cyan ▮ | Esc[36m | Esc[46m |
| Light gray ▮ | Esc[37m | Esc[47m |
| Dark gray ▮ | Esc[90m | Esc[100m |
| Light red ▮ | Esc[91m | Esc[101m |
| Light green ▮ | Esc[92m | Esc[102m |
| Light yellow ▮ | Esc[93m | Esc[103m |
| Light blue ▮ | Esc[94m | Esc[104m |
| Light magenta ▮ | Esc[95m | Esc[105m |
| Light cyan ▮ | Esc[96m | Esc[106m |
| White ▮ | Esc[97m | Esc[107m |
| Bold | Esc[1m | |
| Underline | Esc[4m | |
| No underline | Esc[24m | |
| Reverse text | Esc[7m | |
| Positive text (not reversed) | Esc[27m |
More details on ANSI codes can be found e.g. at here, where more specific feature codes are described.
To define a customized color theme, a specific configuration file needs to placed into the $OPALS_ROOT/cfg directory. If OPALS finds a configuration file named consoleColors.cfg there, the standard hard coded color values will be overruled. This means that in a standard installation $OPALS_ROOT/cfg/consoleColors.cfg does NOT exist. This secures that user color customizations will never be overwritten in case a newer OPALS version is installed into the same directory. However, the installation comes with a few color theme files which can be found in
$OPALS_ROOT/addons/colorThemes/
There, e.g. the default color theme defaultColors.cfg can be found, which is equivalent to the hard coded values:
As it can be seen, the necessary ANSI code prefix and postfix, Esc[ and m must be omitted within the definition. Hence, only the code number or a sequence of code numbers (separated by semi-colons) are set for the corresponding config file entry. Table 2 describes the six config file entries and their meaning supported by OPALS.
| Entry | Standard | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| background | 44;37 | This entry is only consider by the opalsShell start script |
| default | 24;22;37 | standard text; used for info message and always set after any output message |
| error | 31;1;4 | used for error messages |
| warning | 33;1;4 | used for warnings |
| verbose | 37 | used for verbose messages |
| debug | 30;1 | used for debug messages |
In case no code sequence should be used, the corresponding entry can be left empty. $OPALS_ROOT/addons/colorThemes/noColors.cfg doesn't contain any ANSI codes which results in using the standard colors of the corresponding console application (if copied to $OPALS_ROOT/cfg/consoleColors.cfg). Please have a look at $OPALS_ROOT/addons/colorThemes for more color theme config files.
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