There is at least one existing tool to perform automatic syntax highlighting of code and output ANSI escape sequences. Unfortunately, to the best of the author's knowledge, there is no existing tool for highlighting lines of log files that contain a particular pattern. Vim's match and 2match are close, but a little kludgy to use.

The purpose of this tool is to colorize lines matching a particular pattern, to make it easier to highlight relevant lines in a log file, when poring over such files with your coworker or manager.

To install system-wide, run

sudo pip install colorize.py

To install for yourself (under $HOME/.local)

pip install --user colorize.py

Assume we have a file with the following contents.

This is an interesting line with some awesome content.
unrelated line
unrelated line
unrelated line
foobar
Different topic of interest
unrelated line

Then we can run the following commands to see some of effects we want.

colorize.py -h
colorize.py -l
colorize.py -f 'This is an interesting line=Blue' Input.log
colorize.py -f 'This is an interesting line=Blue' -f 'Different topic=Red' Input.log

# Note that we must run less in raw node to see the colors.
colorize.py -f 'This is an interesting line=Blue' | less -R