remkop/picocli

Improve ANSI heuristics: add support for ConEmu, ANSICON, NO_COLOR and CLICOLOR

Closed this issue · 15 comments

bbottema commented

I'm running ConEmu on Windows 10, but Ansi colored mode won't be turned on when using Ansi.AUTO, while Ansi.ON works just fine. How can I remedy this?

remkop commented

Picocli uses a set of heuristics to determine whether to emit ANSI escape codes or not. These are mostly based on environment variables.

Let’s see what we can do to make this work on ConEmu.

Can you show a list of all environment variables on this system? I’m especially interested in the ConEmu variables, but other variables may be helpful if you could include them.

remkop commented

Looking at this list, especially the ConEmuANSI variable looks relevant. Is this environment variable defined and what is its value?

(See also:
https://conemu.github.io/en/AnsiEscapeCodes.html#Environment_variable )

bbottema commented

The following prints out "enabled"

if "%ConEmuANSI%"=="ON"  echo Enabled
if "%ConEmuANSI%"=="OFF" echo Disabled

Can you show a list of all environment variables on this system? I’m especially interested in the ConEmu variables, but other variables may be helpful if you could include them.

Nothing out of the ordinary or ConEmu related. Only thing I noticed is:

ANSICON_HOME=C:\Users\Benny Bottema\Downloads\ansi185\x64
PATH=...%ANSICON_HOME%...

So it seems I have ANSI con installed in the past and later installed ConEmu. Following ConEmu's instructions furter:

$ set ansi
ANSICON=240x1000 (240x57)
ANSICON_DEF=7
ANSICON_HOME=C:\Users\Benny Bottema\Downloads\ansi185\x64

$ echo %ANSICON_VER%
170
remkop commented

Thank you for the information.
I’ve been doing some research.
Can you also give the value of the CLICOLOR and CLICOLOR_FORCE environment variables? These may be implemented as dynamic variables, so they won’t show up in the list printed by the set command. Instead please verify the value with:

echo %CLICOLOR%
echo %CLICOLOR_FORCE%

Thank you for the help!

bbottema commented

Both empty.

remkop commented

Cool, thanks!
I’m thinking to make the following enhancements for picocli 3.9:
(In addition to the existing Ansi enablement logic)

  • disable Ansi when CLICOLOR == 0 or ConEmuANSI == OFF
  • enable Ansi when CLICOLOR == 1 or ConEmuANSI == ON or when ANSICON is defined
  • force Ansi ON when CLICOLOR_FORCE == 1

This should add ANSI color support for both ConEmu and AnsiCon, as well as add support for @jhasse ‘s https://bixense.com/clicolors/ proposal.

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remkop commented

I’ll also add support for NO_COLOR: https://no-color.org/

bbottema commented

man, what a mess. You'd think there would be a standard for everything terminal related by now. I mean, we've been only doing this since... I don't know, 50 years now.

remkop commented

I've pushed a commit to master to improve picocli's heuristics for determining whether it should emit ANSI escape codes or not.

This should address the issue on your system. Can you verify?

I'm still keeping the ticket open because I'm planning to add more unit tests for this.

bbottema commented

Verified, it solves the problem in my situation 👍

Are you planning a release soon?

remkop commented

Thanks for the confirmation.

Yes, planning to do a release within about a week (see 3.9 milestone).
When exactly will depend a bit on how much more time it will take to improve the test coverage...

bbottema commented

Hmm, what about the IntelliJ console? With AUTO it's turned off, but with ON it works fine. Is there a way of detecting ANSI support without manually configuring system variables?

jhasse commented

No, not that I know of. The idea would be that all consoles which support colors but don't are a tty, set CLICOLOR_FORCE to 1.

remkop commented

I created this ticket for IntelliJ: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-205699

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