Stronger terminal colors

[eysi09]

We've been consolidating all the different places we render ANSI colors to the terminal to make it easier to update the colors we use in one place.

Right now our primary color is chalk.grey and judging by internal conversations we mostly agree that it's too light.

On transparent terminals it's practically impossible to read.

The obvious first choice would be to just go for chalk.white but I'm wondering if we want to find some middleground and use some specific hex color. Note that chalk will down sample it to work with any terminal, even those that only support 16 colors. So we should basically find something that down samples to white.

This ticket is meant as a discussion and I'd love to get feedback from the more design oriented folks on the team as well as our community.

To get us started, I'll share some examples below:

Using primary: chalk.grey on a transparent terminal 👇

Using primary: chalk.grey on an opaque terminal 👇

Using primary: chalk.white 👇

Using primary: chalk.hex("#a6a1c7") 👇

We can also play around with other colors. Here's warning: chalk.yellow 👇

Here's warning: chalk.hex("#FFA500") 👇

We could do the same for secondary | success | error styles.

Anyway, just wanted to see if you all had thoughts on this. Otherwise I'd suggest sticking with what we have but changing our primary color from chalk.grey to chalk.white.

[shumailxyz]

A side note:

With this, I suggest to also consider adding an option to disable colored output altogether and show everything in white (or dark for light terminal).

[eysi09]

Good point.

You can already do that though with the FORCE_COLOR env var which chalk respects.

See: https://github.com/chalk/chalk#supportscolor

For example:

This needs to be documented though and made possible via the CLI.

[eysi09]

Added an FAQ entry here: #5448

[stefreak]

I think the behaviour proposed in this comment is reasonable: #2420 (comment)

Basically the proposal is to follow the NO_COLOR standard defined in https://no-color.org/

[eysi09]

You can. See e.g. my screenshot above.

[stefreak]

I know you can using FORCE_COLOR=0; The proposal in the comment is to support the NO_COLOR standard like many other CLI tools. I don't want to start the discussion here because it is unrelated to the color theme itself, but I wanted to reference the existing issue #2420 and specifically that comment, as supporting that standard would make Garden behave like many other CLI tools.

[eysi09]

Oh whoops 🤦‍♂️

I just saw _COLOR and read it as the same. My bad.

I fully agree and I'll fix this.

[eysi09]

I think the behaviour proposed in this comment is reasonable: #2420 (comment)

Fixed in #5451