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samwho / spacer

CLI tool to insert spacers when command output stops
https://github.com/samwho/spacer
MIT License
853 stars 9 forks source link

Support colour codes #2

Closed erbridge closed 1 year ago

erbridge commented 1 year ago

I'm not sure which thing is causing colour codes to get stripped out, spacer, or the command being piped into spacer, but it would be great to be able to have the source print in colour.

samwho commented 1 year ago

I'm pretty sure it's the piping that does it. Lots of tools inspect what STDOUT is, and if it's not a TTY they'll stop outputting colour codes.

I'm not sure if I can let them know spacer wants the colour codes. 🤔

erbridge commented 1 year ago

fwiw, in my case for the thing I'm trying this with, I got "normal" behaviour by passing --ansi always to docker compose like so:

docker compose --ansi always up
samwho commented 1 year ago

Awesome, glad you found a workaround. I think most tools have some way to force ANSI colour codes.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/249723/how-to-trick-a-command-into-thinking-its-output-is-going-to-a-terminal suggests some more general ways around this, but it doesn't look like there's one clear and easy solution.

If spacer were to support this, I think it would have to be by wrapping the command rather than being piped to, e.g.: spacer --after 2 -- subcommand.

Qyriad commented 1 year ago

As a fairly foolproof workaround, you can use faketty to execute piped commands in their own PTY, which will override almost any reasonable auto-color detection.

samwho commented 1 year ago

I don't plan to add support for this into spacer at this time, and if faketty can provide a reasonably generic workaround I'm hopeful that's enough for most people.