Sheep Apps

Colour switch, router and firewall CLI output by vendor

What SheepTerm highlights, how the device family is chosen, and the limits worth knowing.

Checked against SheepTerm for Mac 5.0 (20) and SheepTerm for Windows 0.1 (8), 2026-10.

What gets coloured

SheepTerm paints a colour layer over the terminal as it draws. It recognises the things you scan for in CLI output:

  • IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, masks and CIDR prefixes.
  • MAC addresses, VLAN numbers and interface names.
  • State words: good states in green, warnings in amber, bad states in red.
  • Error and drop counters when the number is not zero.
  • Timestamps, dimmed so they stay out of the way.
Two terminal panes with Cisco IOS-XE and Aruba CX output coloured by vendor, with sample data
Illustration with sample data: Cisco and Aruba output, each coloured for its own family.

The layer is drawn on screen only. It does not change what the device sent, what you copy, or what is written to the session log. Text the device already colours (a prompt, a coloured ls) keeps the device’s colours.

Choose the device family

Each family has its own keyword list, so a vendor’s own wording for states and counters is recognised. The families are Cisco IOS / IOS-XE / NX-OS, Aruba CX, ArubaOS, Huawei VRP, H3C / HPE Comware, Juniper Junos, Palo Alto PAN-OS, Fortinet FortiOS, Check Point Gaia, and Linux / server. There are three ways to pick one:

  1. Auto (all vendors). Leave it here and SheepTerm watches the incoming text and, when it recognises a family, locks to it once. It never overrides a family you chose yourself, and it sends nothing to the device to find out.
  2. Per host. Set Device family in New SSH Connection, New Serial Console or Edit Host. It is saved with the host.
  3. Live. With an SSH or serial tab selected, choose View › Device Family and pick one (the status bar has a control for the same thing).

Turn the colours off or on for the current tab with View › Toggle Highlighting (⇧⌘H). These items are greyed out on local shell and web tabs.

What it does not do

  • The colours are fixed. There is no rule editor or custom colour setting; the palettes are built in. (The terminal theme and font are separate settings.)
  • It is not a parser. Highlighting is a visual aid; it does not interpret the output or send commands.
  • Paging is a separate matter. A per-host option “Disable paging on connect” sends the family’s paging command when you connect, and View › Auto-page (--More--) answers a pager prompt for you. Both are off until you turn them on.

On Windows

SheepTerm for Windows has the same packs, with View › Toggle Highlighting (Ctrl+Shift+H) and View › Device Family.

Get SheepTerm

Download for macOS Download for Windows
 

Free. Mac: macOS 26.4 or later, Apple Silicon, not notarized (right-click, Open on first launch). Windows: 10/11 x64, portable zip, unsigned (SmartScreen may warn).