Would a patch adding color to cat(1) be accepted?

[Eric Pruitt]

I am going to modify cat(1) to add an option to embolden and / or color
symbols added by "--show-nonprinting", "--show-ends" and "--show-tabs".
Maintainers, is this a change you would be willing to merge into
Coreutils codebase? I ask because the manner & style I would use to
write a patch intended for my own use would differ from that of a change
intended for upstream, and I would like to avoid writing the patch twice
if there was some hope of it being accepted.

The implementation I currently have in mind would work much like
colorization in ls(1) and grep(1): a "--color" option would be added
that could be set to "always", "never" (default) or "auto"; user-defined
colors would be controlled by the "CAT_COLORS" environment variable
containing escape sequences used to color symbols associated with each
of the aforementioned command line flags; and when "CAT_COLORS" is
unset, the default escape sequence used by all three options would be
simply make the text bold. Using the same two-character convention used
by GREP_COLORS and LS_COLORS, the default value of of "CAT_COLORS" would
be "np=01:nl=01:tb=01"; "np" is short for "non-printing", "nl" is short
for newline a la "--show-ends" and "tb" is short for "tab."

I often find myself using xxd(1) after running "cat -A" to confirm some
characters are what I think they are. With the proposed feature, it
would be easier determine at a glance if certain characters are literal
values that appear in the original data or if they were added by cat(1).

Please let me know what you think,
Eric