Add --color flag

[sivaplaysmC]

TL;DR

Flag --color forces colored output, even if stdout is not a terminal.

Motivation

• grep --color=always
• ls --color=always

Application

• Allows colored text when piping to tools like fzf outside of zk list --interactive

[sivaplaysmC]

closes #482

[tjex]

Nice addition, although using the color flag with zk list runs the default list output template and not my own from config.toml

list = 'zk list --format "{{style \"faint\" title}} -> {{style \"blue faint\" path}} ... {{#style \"italic faint\"}}({{format-date created \"elapsed\"}}){{/style}}" $@'

This isn't a great experience as each user will be used to having the output formatted in the way they have set it.

Also, once this is sorted, it would be great if you could address the failing test (tesh) cases. Read through CONTRIBUTING.md for clarification on that. I think it's just to do with the standard output from the help menu.

[tjex]

So to be clearer, the color force should hook in somewhere deeper, so that it will still be applied to commands run via aliases / modified config settings.

[sivaplaysmC]

the color force should hook in somewhere deeper, so that it will still be applied to commands run via aliases / modified config settings.

ok, but where do you think should the flag be parsed? i think that adding the --color as a part of the alias make more sense. Are we on the same page?

[sivaplaysmC]

Nice addition, although using the color flag with zk list runs the default list output template and not my own from config.toml

list = 'zk list --format "{{style \"faint\" title}} -> {{style \"blue faint\" path}} ... {{#style \"italic faint\"}}({{format-date created \"elapsed\"}}){{/style}}" $@'

This isn't a great experience as each user will be used to having the output formatted in the way they have set it.

Also, once this is sorted, it would be great if you could address the failing test (tesh) cases. Read through CONTRIBUTING.md for clarification on that. I think it's just to do with the standard output from the help menu.

sure, i'll look into it once i complete the implementation 👍🏻

[sivaplaysmC]

@tjex ,

Nice addition, although using the color flag with zk list runs the default list output template and not my own from config.toml

list = 'zk list --format "{{style \"faint\" title}} -> {{style \"blue faint\" path}} ... {{#style \"italic faint\"}}({{format-date created \"elapsed\"}}){{/style}}" $@'

This isn't a great experience as each user will be used to having the output formatted in the way they have set it.

Also, once this is sorted, it would be great if you could address the failing test (tesh) cases. Read through CONTRIBUTING.md for clarification on that. I think it's just to do with the standard output from the help menu.

The purpose of the --color flag is to display colored text, even if the ouput is not a tty (which usually happens when you are piping the output of zk to a pager or fzf).

tl;dr,

[tjex]

Yep, I'm on the same page.
So it would seem that this issue should only apply to calling aliases. On line 175 in main.go is the function runAlias. Zk executes an alias when it discovers that the first argument of a call to zk is in the user's aliases section.

This is why running zk --color list for me does not execute my alias.

So the question then is, do we want the --color flag to only be available to the list command? Based on the current commands we have, it makes reasonable sense (forcing the color of any of the other command outputs is not needed I would say?).

This could be the simplest solution, to just add the --color flag as a postional flag for list. Then it would simply be appended to an alias.

so zk <list-as-alias-that-gets-expanded> --color

Thoughts?

[sivaplaysmC]

do we want the --color flag to only be available to the list command?

Yes. This actually makes more sense as none of the other commands use colored output (with the exception of edit -i, which uses FZF directly).

[github-actions]

This pull request has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity.

[sivaplaysmC]

So to be clearer, the color force should hook in somewhere deeper, so that it will still be applied to commands run via aliases / modified config settings.

Ok, I can confirm this.I just tested it out, and it does not work correctly.

export PATH=~/repos/zk:$PATH
cat .zk/config.toml | rg '\[alias' --after-context=2
zk list --color | less
zk --color list | less

The last two commands give the same output.

Do you have any idea why this happens @tjex ??