Not intuitive how to display colourized output with less on Fedora

[scfc]

On Fedora and generally in the Linux environment, commands that can colourize their output typically have three options: On, off, and automatic where the colouration depends on whether standard output is connected to a TTY or not. With this experience, I tried to use xq to inspect some XML file.

First try, xq file.xml, send (beautifully) colourized output to my console, but exceeded the page size (due to the file's size).

So I fed xq's output to less (xq file.xml | less), but this produced only non-colourized output.

With jq, one can achieve colourized output in less with jq -C . | less -R, so I searched xq's documentation for an option to colourize the output even if it is connected to a pipe, but found only --no-color, the opposite of what I was trying to do.

Only after reading the source, I found that PAGER=less xq file.xml does what I want. (On Fedora, $PAGER is not set by default.)

So I'd like to propose a new option --color à la ls & Co. with three variants: --color=never does not colourize the output, --color=always colourizes the output unconditionally, and --color=auto does so when standard output is connected to a TTY.

[sibprogrammer]

But such an option already exists:
curl -s https://www.w3schools.com/xml/note.xml | xq --color | less
Or am I missing something?

[sibprogrammer]

The help also describes it:

$ ./xq --help | grep color
  -c, --color            Force colorful output
      --no-color         Disable colorful output

[scfc]

Well, I missed the --color option, so there is no need to add one. (Or, in other words: Thanks for having already added one :-).)

I tried to reconstruct why I did not see it, and it was due to me looking at the man page, not xq --help's output. AFAICS, --color is the only option not mentioned in the man page.

[sibprogrammer]

the only option not mentioned in the man page

Good catch, thank you! :)