Clojure is a wonderful language. The more I use it, the more I like it.

But the default error reporting is catastrophically bad, forcing you to look through screensful of Java stack-trace for the needle of a bit of code that’s actually yours.

I’m sure there are better solutions, but today I just hacked a very quick and dirty python program to filter this result, highlighting the lines that I care about.

#!/usr/bin/python

import sys
p = sys.argv[1]

for line in sys.stdin :
    if p in line :
        print '33[92m' + line + '33[0m',
    else :
        print line,

I made this code in an executable file called “colourit” in my bin directory. Now I can do this :


lein test |& colourit patterning


to, for example, highlight lines containing the word “patterning”.