DendROS adds color-coded terminal output and viewer for ROS 2

DendROS is a new open-source utility designed to manage the complex terminal output generated by ROS 2 launch files. It allows users to group nodes by color and labels using a YAML configuration, providing a dedicated viewer for searching, filtering, and scrolling through logs without interrupting the running launch. The tool also highlights crashes, tracebacks, and runtime parameter changes.

Technical features of DendROS

• Wraps the ros2 command using a bash function to pipe output through a colorizer.
• Uses a dendROS.yaml file to define node groups, colors, and labels (supports wildcards).
• Provides an interactive viewer with commands for focusing specific nodes, filtering by severity level, and live grep.
• Integrates with the ros2 CLI to apply group colors to commands like node list and topic list.
• Automatically highlights Python tracebacks and runtime parameter changes.
• Requires only Python 3 and PyYAML as dependencies.

Why it matters

DendROS aims to reduce debugging friction for robotics developers by making multi-node terminal logs more navigable and visually distinct.