grep on EOL (End of Line character)

Running grep a second time to highlight a different word causes all other lines without the word to disappear. The secret is to grep on different word OR the EOL character (\$ or simply $). The full explanation is here:

• How to highlight a word in the output of “cat”?

The new command becomes:

• xrandr --current | grep -e " connected" -A1 | grep -E '\*|$':

And it returns this:

• $ represents searching for EOL (End of Line) character which is on every line. This means every line from the first grep reappears on the second grep. The EOL character is not visible so you don’t see ⏎ highlighted at the end of every line.
• Because the second grep is searching for * (which is a control character), it needs to be prepended with \. Normally you would simply use word|$ to search and not \word|$. The asterisk (or splat) * character is an exception. See Escaping Meta-Characters.

Bonus Answer 1

Enhance output by highlighting Hz values

Using the answer from: Matching decimal number in grep. You can highlight the actual frequency rate in addition to the *.

This command:

xrandr --current | grep -e " connected" -A1 | grep -E '[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\*|$'

Gives you this:

Bonus Answer 2

Enhance output with different highlight colors

The default red highlight color may not stand out well on your monitor. I know it is kind of washed out in my gnome-terminal. From this colored grep blog you can create these aliases:

alias    grey-grep="GREP_COLOR='1;30' grep --color=always"
alias     red-grep="GREP_COLOR='1;31' grep --color=always"
alias   green-grep="GREP_COLOR='1;32' grep --color=always"
alias  yellow-grep="GREP_COLOR='1;33' grep --color=always"
alias    blue-grep="GREP_COLOR='1;34' grep --color=always"
alias magenta-grep="GREP_COLOR='1;35' grep --color=always"
alias    cyan-grep="GREP_COLOR='1;36' grep --color=always"
alias   white-grep="GREP_COLOR='1;37' grep --color=always"

For permanent availability (persistent across reboots) add them to your ~/.bashrc file.

These commands:

xrandr --current | grep -e " connected" -A1 | green-grep -E '[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\*|$'
xrandr --current | grep -e " connected" -A1 | yellow-grep -E '[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\*|$'
xrandr --current | grep -e " connected" -A1 | cyan-grep -E '[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\*|$'

Gives you this:

• After trying all the colors I’m leading towards yellow as my favorite.