colorize command line output

[AndyElliottCRL]

Specifics TBA but even before a GUI is ready we should be able to make the command line interface more user friendly by using colors and highlighting. Adding now as placeholder/don't forget for future.

[nflorin]

There are two questions here: what to do and how to do it. The what is hard, so a note on the how. The options seem to be:

• termcolor
• sty
• colorama
• or rolling our own

termcolor is the most frequently suggested. It seems stable, is well documented, and worked in my tests, but it also hasn't been updated in a decade. I think colorama is mainly for Windows. sty says it works on *nix and recent Windows Terminal installs. I'm not going to roll my own.

All of this is to say it looks like we'll be using termcolor.

[nflorin]

Also putting this as low priority. I think we need to either commit to a GUI or commit to a fuller command line version. So I'm not going to throw a lot of effort at either a GUI or a prettier command line until we make a decision one way or another.

[nflorin]

I did a test of this for the file location command line outputs from issue #26 . It uses termcolor, and then also imports colorama to suppress ANSI codes that pop up on the basic Windows command line and a couple of other places. Here's the output on cmd.exe under Windows 10:

Not amazing, but fine.

I'm going to keep a list of environments where the color output works and where it doesn't work in the next two comments.

[nflorin]

Command line colors tested and working on:

• Windows 10:

  • Windows command line (cmd.exe)
  • Windows Terminal:
    • Command prompt
    • Powershell
    • Git bash
    • WSL (Ubuntu 20.04)
  • WSL (Ubuntu 20.04) in the default terminal (mintty)
  • Ubuntu 20.04:
  • xfce4-terminal. The default theme causes yellow to display as #aa5500, a "medium dark brown", but there is no way around that so long as the theme interprets "yellow" as something not yellow.
  • The console
  • Other terminals: lx-terminal, gnome-terminal, xterm. I'd like to try konsole, but the general assumption should be that it will work on most anything.

[nflorin]

Command line colors tested and not working on:

• Windows 10:
  • Git bash command line using default terminal (mintty). Prints as plain light text.
  • Powershell default terminal. Partially works. Red and green print. Yellow doesn't seem to do anything. Blue is unreadable against the terminal background. I found red to be unreadable as well. I think there's no way to make a color scheme that looks good on Powershell's brilliant blue.

[nflorin]

I changed the blue to cyan and put the red on a white background to make the output readable on Powershell. That will be enough for now. Here it is on cmd.exe:

[nflorin]

Most of the terminal interface has some colorizing to it. Still need to colorize the output of the quick scan and the output of the main run itself.

[nflorin]

The current main menu (in VS Code's built in terminal under Linux):

[nflorin]

Everything has at least preliminary coloring. I'll update as needed, but it should be good for now.