I’ve always been annoyed by not having clearly marked errors (besides the word “error”) when using gcc/g++ from shell.

Now a simple python script helps me to notice every appearing error out of lots of unimportant lines of stuff (warnings e.g.).

highlight.py:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

import sys while 1: input = sys.stdin.readline() if len(input.lower().split("error")) > 1: print chr(27) + '[91;1m' + input.strip() + chr(27) + '[0;0m' else: print input.strip()

Additionally I created a function and an alias in .bashrc which determines the behavior of the shell:

alias gcc_real=$(which gcc)
alias gcc='gcc_highlight'
function gcc_highlight()
{
gcc_real $@ 2>&1 | python ~/highlight.py
}

alias gpp_real=$(which g++)
#...and the same for g++
}

The usage of gcc_real is very important, otherwise gcc would call gcc and so on…perfect recursion.
gcc errors are not reported over stdout but over stderr which means i had to use 2>&1 to forward them.