• Explain quecto and fix import version in README.md

Initial release of QuectoColors — a high-performance ANSI terminal color styling library for Dart with correct nested color support.

Core Architecture #

• All-static design using pre-computed static final closures for zero per-call allocation on the standard 16 ANSI colors and text styles.
• createStyler() central factory that builds closures with pre-cached close code bytes, pre-warmed StringBuffer, and unrolled codeUnitAt() ESC scanning for fast nested color detection and re-injection.
• Close code length branching (4 vs 5 chars) resolved at closure creation time, not per-call.

Color Support #

• 16 standard ANSI colors — foreground, background, and bright variants (black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, white, gray/grey).
• Text styles — bold, dim, italic, underline, overline, inverse, hidden, strikethrough, and reset.
• 256-color xterm palette — ansi256(), bgAnsi256(), underlineAnsi256() for foreground, background, and colored underlines.
• 16M true color RGB — rgb(), bgRgb(), underlineRgb() for full 24-bit color.
• 149 CSS/X11 named colors — generated foreground, background, and underline color methods for all CSS/X11 named colors (e.g., cornflowerBlue, onTomato, onAliceBlueUnderline). Names that conflict with ANSI builtins are suffixed with X11 (e.g., greenX11).
• rgbToAnsi256() utility — convert arbitrary RGB values to the nearest xterm 256-color index.

API Styles #

• String extensions ('text'.red, 'text'.bold.bgBlue) — the most concise API, delegating to QuectoColors statics.
• Static methods (QuectoColors.red('text')) — useful for storing stylers in variables and passing as function references.
• AnsiPen fluent interface (AnsiPen()..red()..bold) — compatible with the ansicolor package's AnsiPen API including rgb(), gray()/grey(), xterm(), down, up, write(), call(), and cascade (..) syntax. BUT UNLIKE the ansicolor package we properly support nesting of styles!

Plain Fast Path #

• QuectoPlain provides zero-scan stylers that skip ESC byte scanning entirely — pure '$openCode$string$closeCode' interpolation for ~3x speedup on long strings when nesting is not needed.

AnsiPen Compatibility #

• Drop-in replacement for the ansicolor package — change import 'package:ansicolor/ansicolor.dart' to import 'package:quectocolors/ansipen.dart'.
• Exports ansiColorDisabled, ansiEscape, ansiDefault, ansiResetForeground, ansiResetBackground, and deprecated aliases (color_disabled, ansi_esc, ansi_default).
• up/down getters and toString() override for inline '${pen}text${pen.up}' usage.

Platform Detection #

• Automatic ANSI support detection via Dart conditional imports (dart.library.io checks stdout.supportsAnsiEscapes, web assumes true).
• Global ansiColorDisabled toggle to disable all color output.

Nested Color Handling #

• When a nested style's close code appears inside an outer style, the outer style is automatically re-injected — ('Hello ${"world".blue}!').red correctly restores red after the blue text ends. Other Dart ANSI packages (ansicolor, colorize) do not handle this case.

Package Structure #

• Three import entry points:
  • quectocolors.dart — core colors, styles, and string extensions.
  • ansipen.dart — AnsiPen compatibility layer (import separately).
  • quectocolors_css.dart — core + 149 CSS/X11 named color extensions.
• Pure Dart package, no Flutter dependency.
• Inline SVG doc comments on all color fields for IDE color preview swatches.