A modern, lightweight library for handling colors, styles, and Unicode characters in the terminal.
mauw is a library written in TypeScript focused on efficient color and style management for the terminal. It provides modern utilities for working with RGB, HEX, backgrounds, static variants, and Unicode character support, offering smart fallbacks for environments where certain symbols or colors are not available.
Designed with a focus on performance, strong typing, and minimal weight, mauw is ideal for CLIs, development tools, and terminal applications that seek consistent visual output without sacrificing speed or simplicity.
mauw prioritizes explicitness, composability, and performance. No hidden state, no magic globals, no unnecessary abstractions.
- RGB, HEX, and background color support
- Smart Unicode fallbacks for incompatible terminals
- Fully typed API (TypeScript-first)
- Extremely small bundle size
- Terminal-focused, no browser bloat
- ESM-ready
mauw is designed to be fast and lightweight, with minimal startup and runtime overhead, making it suitable even for short-lived CLI commands.
- Smaller than most popular color libraries
- Stronger typing than legacy solutions
- No ANSI magic leaking into user code
- Designed for performance-critical CLI tools
- Minimal runtime overhead
- Strong typing without sacrificing speed
- Predictable output across terminals
npm install mauwmauw provides a simple and expressive API for styling terminal output using colors and Unicode-safe utilities.
mauw is optimized for functional composition. Property chaining is supported for convenience, but functional composition is the recommended and fastest approach.
import mauw from 'mauw/colors';
console.log(
mauw.rgb(255, 0, 0)('Red text'),
mauw.hex('#00ff99')('Green text'),
mauw.blue('Blue text')
);import mauw from 'mauw/colors';
console.log(
mauw.bgRgb(30, 30, 30)('Dark background'),
mauw.bgHex('#1e1e1e')('HEX background'),
mauw.bgGreen("Green background")
);import mauw from 'mauw/colors';
console.log(mauw.bgRgb(200, 40, 40).bold('Highlighted text'));
console.log(mauw.bgRgb(200, 40, 40)(mauw.bold('Highlighted text')));import { COLORS_ENABLED } from 'mauw/colors';
if (COLORS_ENABLED) {
console.log('Colors are enabled in this terminal');
}Use this mode when you want the best possible output without worrying about the environment. The library automatically detects Unicode support and selects the optimal character set.
import character from 'mauw/characters';
console.log(character.success, 'Build finished');
console.log(character.warning, 'Low disk space');
console.log(character.arrowRight, 'Next step');✔ Recommended for most use cases ✔ Safe for CI, SSH, and older terminals ✔ Works with lazy loading and tree-shaking
Useful when you need fully predictable output, such as:
- plain logs
.txtfiles- environments without Unicode support (embedded or legacy systems)
import character from 'mauw/characters/fallback';
console.log(character.success, 'Tests passed');
console.log(character.pointerSmall, 'Running lint');
console.log(character.line.repeat(20));- No Unicode characters
- Fully portable
- Ideal for logs and serialized output
Use this mode when you know the environment supports Unicode and want the richest visual output.
import character from 'mauw/characters/unicode';
console.log(character.checkboxOn, 'Feature enabled');
console.log(character.heart, 'Powered by mauw');
console.log(character.boxRoundedTopLeft + character.line.repeat(8));- Rich visual output
- Perfect for modern CLIs
- Includes symbols, spinners, and box-drawing characters
You can mix imports depending on your needs:
import base from 'mauw/characters/base';
import unicode from 'mauw/characters/unicode';
console.log(base.dot, unicode.star, 'Release ready');This keeps your bundle small while maintaining consistent output.
This library provides a curated set of terminal-friendly symbols, designed to work consistently across environments.
When Unicode is supported, richer symbols are used. Otherwise, clean ASCII fallbacks are applied automatically.
Used when the terminal supports Unicode characters.
Automatically used in non-Unicode environments (CI, legacy terminals, limited fonts).
Spinners are animated using the same fallback strategy, ensuring smooth behavior in all environments.
- Symbols are data-only (no rendering side effects)
- Fallbacks are deterministic and predictable
- Designed for CLIs, logs, and interactive demos
- Color is applied optionally, not baked into symbols
See the full benchmark suite in the
bench/directory.
mauw is built with performance as a first-class concern. Its core focuses on minimizing allocations, avoiding unnecessary string operations, and favoring functional composition over heavy chaining mechanisms.
In practice, this results in:
- Significantly lower execution time compared to common terminal color libraries
- Near-zero allocations in most simple color operations
- Extremely fast nested styling and composition
- Minimal overhead even in short-lived CLI processes
Benchmarks show that mauw consistently outperforms popular alternatives in basic coloring, nested styles, and composition patterns, while also producing less garbage for the runtime to clean up.
All performance claims are fully reproducible.
To manually verify and compare results, you can run the benchmark suite included in the repository:
npm install
node bench/load.ts
node bench/dryrun.ts
node bench/performance.tsThis will execute real-world scenarios comparing mauw against other well-known libraries, allowing you to validate execution time, memory usage, and composition cost on your own machine.
Performance may vary depending on runtime, CPU, and OS, but relative efficiency remains consistent.
Thanks to these amazing people:
MIT © Kkotero
Issues and pull requests are welcome.
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