How to use colored output on Windows

[fu050409]

Hi! I looked up the related issues and discussions, and found that #2790 refers that clap had already supported display colored text on Windows when clap is v3. I was using clap v4, but I found that there's doc string at clap::ColorChoice::Always:

This setting only applies to Unix, Linux, and macOS (i.e. non-Windows platforms)

And my Powershell doesnt work to display coloured text with clap indeed and I had cmd.color(ColorChoice::Always) configured. I dont know what happened. Am I misconfigured something? How can I fix this? If you need more information, feel free to let me know.

Any response will be appreciate. ❤️

[epage]

The documentation is incorrect and has been fixed.

What version of windows and what terminal are you using for Powershell (cmd vs Terminal Preview vs Terminal)?

[fu050409]

Thank you for your reply. This is a part of my Cargo.lock:

[[package]]
name = "clap"
version = "4.5.9"
source = "registry+https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index"
checksum = "64acc1846d54c1fe936a78dc189c34e28d3f5afc348403f28ecf53660b9b8462"
dependencies = [
 "clap_builder",
]

[[package]]
name = "clap_builder"
version = "4.5.9"
source = "registry+https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index"
checksum = "6fb8393d67ba2e7bfaf28a23458e4e2b543cc73a99595511eb207fdb8aede942"
dependencies = [
 "anstream",
 "anstyle",
 "clap_lex",
 "strsim",
]

I was using Windows terminal v1.20.11781.0 (The latest stable version on windows 11). I also tried my program in the terminal of VSCode, there's no colored text either.

[epage]

Whats your Cargo.toml entry for clap?

[fu050409]

[dependencies]
clap        = "4"

[profile.release]
lto = true

I tried to add some debug expresions, I got clap.get_color(): always, clap.is_disable_colored_help_set(): false.

I tried to just complie a simple clap example like:

Command::new("myprog")
    .color(ColorChoice::Always)
    .get_matches();

It dosen't help.

[fu050409]

I think I solved it and it looks like it was my problem.
It looks like even if clap is configured with ColorChoice::Always it doesn't show the colours by default, I was missing this part of the code:

{
    use clap::builder::styling;
    let styles = styling::Styles::styled()
      .header(styling::AnsiColor::Green.on_default() | styling::Effects::BOLD)
      .usage(styling::AnsiColor::Green.on_default() | styling::Effects::BOLD)
      .literal(styling::AnsiColor::Cyan.on_default() | styling::Effects::BOLD)
      .placeholder(styling::AnsiColor::Cyan.on_default());
    clap = clap.styles(styles);
}

Thank you for your patience in answering!

[epage]

We do terminal styling by default (bold, underline) but do not include colors in the default style.

[liciana24]

@epage this feature should probably not be labelled color anymore then. it gives the wrong impression and personally i was just confused by the naming and lack of coloring. also no clear way to reenable it and the "color" feature is on by default which doubly gives the wrong impression. maybe "style" is a better name for it, otherwise it needs WAY more clear to users. i even checked the changelog for v4 and it was not explicit that colors were disabled. users needed to hopefully find the right links and thread and read through MANY pages to get the info on this.

[fu050409]

Can't agree more

[epage]

While it may be confusing, the convention is to use the term "color" to refer to terminal styling

• --color flag controls terminal styling, not just color
• APIs like termcolor, ColorChoice, etc tend to refer to terminal styling and not just color