ASCII or other program-friendly output mode about rakkess

[corneliusweig]

@itowlson Oh please do go ahead with the ascii formatting. I think yes/no is just fine. For now I like your idea to disable coloring in ascii mode. However, ideally we should turn it on again, if we can reliably detect a PowerShell terminal.

I've also opened another issue to track the coloring on PowerShell #6. Since I cannot investigate this, could you kindly look into this as well?

[corneliusweig]

You are raising two separate points.

1. Color output. This is disabled for non-terminals, e.g. rakkess | cat or rakkess > result.txt do not produce colors. Also, PowerShell should (I can't check) not output colors, because this is determined at pkg/rakkess/util/printer.go:79 with

   func IsTerminal(fd int) bool {  
    _, err := unix.IoctlGetTermios(fd, ioctlReadTermios)
    return err == nil
   }
   

   PowerShell being not unix, should return false here.
   So I think color output is fine and does not need work (you can prove me wrong if you have a PowerShell :) )

2. Ascii formatting. This is a good point. What do you think about a flag --ascii or --ascii-mode so that granted/denied is printed as yes/no or even granted/denied? pkg/rakkess/util/printer.go is where you would want to start.

[itowlson]

Good point - I am indeed mixing two things.

As you say, PowerShell does not support colour, but what I found was that rakkess still printed the escape codes - but they were rendered as codes and square brackets. I can retry tomorrow and post a screenshot if that would be useful. I think on Draft we gave up trying to be clever about this and just turned colours off on Windows!

Anyway you are right that these are two separate issues. I'd be interested in tackling ASCII output if you are okay with that. I suggest that ASCII formatting should automatically suppress colours, and I'd tentatively go with yes/no. Other ideas are granted/denied as you suggest, or allowed/denied. Let me know if you have a preference, otherwise I'll try to get you a PR and we can iterate on it there! And thanks for the pointer on the printer.go starting point.

[lgmorand]

any idea what could cause encoding issues under WSL (Windows Linux Subsystem). that the first time, I have encoding issues with bash

[corneliusweig]

@lgmorand unfortunately no. IIUC, you are saying that other UTF encoded text prints correctly, right? If anyone knows, I bet @itowlson does.
Maybe open a separate issue so that other folks can find the bug.

[lgmorand]

@corneliusweig exactly. it's def looks like an encoding issue but it seems a common, with not clear solution: microsoft/terminal#190

I don't use Windows Terminal but I don't believe in coincidences :)