CMake CPPLINT coloured output

Question

Is there any way to colour the cpplint output when setting

set(CMAKE_CXX_CPPLINT "cpplint")

in the cmake file?

Answer 1

If you want to color any output, you have to communicate that intention to the thing that displays it. For displaying the output of commands, typically a terminal is used, nowadays in the form of terminal emulator.

If your terminal supports ANSI color escape sequences, you could just mock cpplint process and output a color code before and after it is run. On a *unix environment you could create an executable file named mycpplint with the content along:

#!/bin/sh
printf '\E[36m' ; cpplint "$@" ; printf '\E[0m'

and then add that executable file location to PATH and do set(CMAKE_CXX_CPPLINT "mycpplint").