Color-coded ROS 2 output — because a wall of white text from 32 nodes is nobody's debugging tool.

Documentation

You launched your stack. Nav2, SLAM, hardware drivers, your own nodes — all printing to the same terminal, all the same color. By the time you find the line you were looking for, it has scrolled past.

Vanilla ros2 launch	With DendROS

DendROS assigns each group of nodes its own color. You could have localization in blue, navigation in green, hardware in orange — defined once in a small YAML file that lives inside your package. No launch file edits. No new ROS 2 dependencies. Packages without a config pass through completely unchanged.

And since 1.1, ros2 launch opens in a full-screen viewer where you scroll, search and filter the log while the launch keeps running.

New in 1.1: TUI mode

ros2 launch now opens in a full-screen log viewer:

• Scroll back and copy — the whole run stays in the scrollback; drag with the mouse to copy. Crash and parameter alerts stay pinned in the header.
• Filter and search with \ — focus on some nodes, filter by level or grep, find text and step through the matches, mute the noisy ones. Filters stack, and Esc peels them off one at a time.
• mark and tee — drop a timestamped marker before you poke the robot, then save exactly what you see to a file for the bug report.
• Drive it from another terminal — dendros focus planner_server, dendros grep timeout, … reach the running launch, so you don’t have to switch panes.
• dendros reopen — closed it too early? Bring back the last run, scrollback and all.

It falls back to the classic output on its own when the output is piped or redirected, so scripts and CI are not affected. Prefer the plain scrolling output? Set launch_mode: classic. → TUI Mode · → Console commands

Features

• Color by group

  One config file per package maps node groups to colors, badges, and display rules. Wildcards cover whole families of nodes (nav2_*), and keywords can be highlighted per group or package-wide.

• One command to get started

  Too lazy to look up how DendROS config works? We got you covered: dendros init scans your launch files and generates an initial config for you.

• The main ros2 CLI commands, colorized

  ros2 node list, node info, topic list, service list, action list, param list and param describe use the same group colors and badges, with no extra config. → Full list

• Crashes, tracebacks and parameter changes

  A banner flags crashed nodes the moment they die and lists the exit code. Python tracebacks are colored automatically. When a parameter changes at runtime, a notice shows the node, the parameter and old → new value.

<img align=”right” src=”docs/assets/images/dendrobate.png”

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