Fancy Compilation

This is a minimalist package that enhances compilation-mode in the following ways.

• Support color output.
• Support progress updates on a single line (as used by ninja, sphinx and many other build systems).
• Use scrolling behavior similar to most terminals.
• Optionally use foreground & background independent of theme colors.

Motivation

There are some limitations with compilation output that I found make it less usable than building from a terminal.

• No color output from the compilers diagnostics.
• No support for printing text progress on a single line which works well to avoid the output being flooded by files that were compiled, making it easier to miss important warnings.

While this may seem small - improved diagnostics to help identifying an error and reducing the risk of missing a warning make them both valuable features. This package was written to conveniently support these as well as other minor quality of life features in Emacs.

Usage

This can be lazily loaded after compile.

(with-eval-after-load 'compile
  (fancy-compilation-mode))

Once this global mode is enabled, calling compile will use enhancements from this package.

Customization

fancy-compilation-term: "tmux-256color"

The TERM environment variable to use (set to an empty string to leave unset).

fancy-compilation-override-colors: t

Override theme faces (foreground/background).

fancy-compilation-default-face

The face to use for default text when fancy-compilation-override-colors is enabled.

fancy-compilation-quiet-prelude: t

Suppress text such as "Compilation Started" which is otherwise included before compilation output.

fancy-compilation-quiet-prolog: t

Use brief text output when compilation has completed.

Hints

Since tools that output to the compilation buffer wont recognize it as a TTY, you may need to force color output.

GCC

Pass -fdiagnostics-color=always, typically via (CFLAGS & CXXFLAGS).

Clang

Pass -fcolor-diagnostics, typically via (CFLAGS & CXXFLAGS)