Integrate the Library as Submodule

The recommended way to consume Erbsland Color Terminal is to add it to your repository and build it together with your application. This keeps the dependency pinned to a known revision and makes local changes easy to test.

The library is designed to be linked as a static library.

Project Structure

A typical project layout using the parser as a submodule might look like this:

<project root>                       # Your project root directory
    ├── erbsland-cpp-color-term      # The Erbsland Color Terminal sources
    │   └── (...)
    ├── <project>                    # Your application source directory
    │   ├── src                      # Application source files
    │   │   └── (...)
    │   └── CMakeLists.txt           # CMake build file for your app
    ├── (...)
    └── CMakeLists.txt               # Top-level CMake configuration file

The CMake Configuration

Below is a minimal example of how to configure your project using CMake:

<project>/CMakeLists.txt

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.25)
project(ExampleProject)

add_subdirectory(erbsland-cpp-color-term)
add_subdirectory(example)

<project>/example/CMakeLists.txt

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.25)
project(Example)

add_executable(example
    src/main.cpp
)

target_compile_features(example PRIVATE cxx_std_20)
target_link_libraries(example PRIVATE erbsland-color-term)

How to Compile

To build your project with this setup, run the following commands from your project root:

$ mkdir cmake-build
$ cmake . -B cmake-build
...
-- Build files have been written to: ~/example/cmake-build

$ cmake --build cmake-build
[  1%] Building CXX object Color.cpp.o
[  3%] Building CXX object Terminal.cpp.o
...
[100%] Linking CXX executable example
[100%] Built target example

Faster Builds Using Ninja

For faster and more reliable incremental builds, we recommend using Ninja as your build tool on all platforms.

$ mkdir cmake-build
$ cmake . -G Ninja -B cmake-build
$ cmake -B cmake-build -j 8