It is possible for stdout to be a tty and still not support ANSI colors. One example of this is the :! command in GVim or MacVim. I had long assumed that the only way to reliably detect this was to introduce a heavyweight dependency such as libncurses, but recently I learned that checking that the environment variable TERM is set to a value other than dumb is largely sufficient. This is what Git does, for example:
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It is possible for stdout to be a tty and still not support ANSI colors. One example of this is the
:!
command in GVim or MacVim. I had long assumed that the only way to reliably detect this was to introduce a heavyweight dependency such as libncurses, but recently I learned that checking that the environment variableTERM
is set to a value other thandumb
is largely sufficient. This is what Git does, for example:https://github.com/git/git/blob/0d0ac3826a3bbb9247e39e12623bbcfdd722f24c/editor.c#L11-L15
This patch implements identical behavior for Thor.