Only colorize when the output is stdout

[owenthereal]

The code looks good. But could you give me a use case of not using ccat in a terminal?

[gilliek]

Thanks :)

Simply ccat foo.go > bar.go ;-) One of the use case of cat(1). This way, ccat can be used as a replacement of cat(1).

[owenthereal]

ccat foo.go > bar.go should work without your check of terminal since it outputs to stdout? The > is actually piping stdout to a file.

[owenthereal]

Oh okay, or you want ccat to fall back to cat when there's a >?

[gilliek]

Yes it works, but it also outputs the color codes

[gilliek]

Precisely :)

[owenthereal]

I'm thinking having a flag so that people could disable syntax highlighting like this: ccat -p main.go > foo (p stands for plain text). It's a more generic solution adapting to all cases.

[gilliek]

It could be nice too :) But my point is that the output, outside of a terminal, is completely useless since the ANSI escape codes only work within a terminal so I see no reason in favor of colorizing when there is a >. I think it's more convenient to fallback to a cat like behavior in this very case.

[owenthereal]

Ah, make sense :+1:. I merged it in https://github.com/jingweno/ccat/commit/25c0ff0882947c36556bcce03664c15e15cb1991

[gilliek]

Thanks :)

[rolinh]

The behavior proposed by @gilliek here is similar to --color=auto on some GNU tools (see ls man page for instance) and is the expected behavior by most users I'd say. I would not use a new flag for that and as @gilliek stated, there is no point in having ANSI escape codes in a text file.

[owenthereal]

@Rolinh Sure, the change is in master, feel free to try it out :smiley_cat: