Dictate

The Überfunktion of printing. Generics, colors, formats, margins, it has them all.

Dictate is a family of print functions tailored, but not limited to the cli.

Dictate

• is generic,
• is variadic,
• resolves irritating <stdio.h> inconsistencies,
• has debug variants,
• has a convenient way to handle colors,
• and adds margin support.

Example

Generic and variadic?

Yes, dictate() is generic and variadic. You can pass in as many arguments as you wish and with the types you wish, without requiring a format string. Unless of couse you want a format string, in which case dictatef() -behaving like printf(), but with the rest of the dictate features- has you covered. This is accomplished with a combination of C11's _Generic and macros.

Irritating stdio inconsistencies

The sole reason dictate exists is this:

    fprintf(FILE *, char *, ...); // FILE first
    fputs(char *, FILE *);        // FILE last

Colors

With dictate, instead of passing in ascii escape sequences directly, you pass in color specifies of the form: $<first-letter-of-color>. Not only is this easier to remember, you can also toggle their rendering (per thread), which makes implementing something like NO_COLOR compliance trivial.

Debug builds

Dictate provides debug_* variants for its every function. These are only executed if DEBUG was defined, otherwise they result in nops.

Margins

Margins are characters which appear on the left of each line of an output. They are useful for distinguishing regions of output for a reader. Examples would include valgrind or cmdtest. Dictate has function variants which produce such margins.

Notes

Dictate requires C23.

For the full documentation, please consult the header, it was made to be readable.