Forced styling has no affect without a TTY

[ofek]

Can be seen in https://github.com/jquast/blessed/pull/232 if you click run

[avylove]

What you're trying to demonstrate can be done with:

>>> import io
>>> import os
>>> import blessed
>>> stream = io.StringIO()
>>> os.environ['TERM'] = ""
>>> term = blessed.Terminal(stream=stream, force_styling=True)
>>> term.bold_red('test TTY')
'test TTY'

The problem is not that it's not a TTY, but that you don't have a TERM environment variable and you haven't specified kind when initializing Terminal. Essentially the library is honoring force_styling, but doesn't know what terminal type to use or terminal capabilities, so assumes a null one with no capabilities.

Restart REPL before running this

>>> import io
>>> import os
>>> import blessed
>>> stream = io.StringIO()
>>> os.environ['TERM'] = ""
>>> term = blessed.Terminal(stream=stream, force_styling=True, kind='xterm')
>>> term.bold_red('test TTY')
'\x1b[1m\x1b[31mtest TTY\x1b(B\x1b[m'

[ofek]

Ah, thanks! So when forcing one must also set kind. Is xterm the preferred value or are there others?

[avylove]

Well, I would say you should set kind if it can not be automatically determined or you want to be specific.

xterm or xterm-256color are the most common and what most terminals emulate these days. If you're just doing basic colors, xterm is fine. It really just depends on your use case.

[ofek]

Thank you!