Some colours are grey about crayon

[richfitz]

Beautiful, thanks!

[richfitz]

This is a problem again, at least on my system (linux, terminal, R 3.2.2 with github and CRAN versions of crayon). Can you reopen? Any idea how to detect regressions?

[richfitz]

[gaborcsardi]

I am not sure if this is a regression. But it could be. What does crayon::num_colors() say? Sys.getenv()? (Remove authentication tokens!)

[richfitz]

You're right, sorry for the false alarm -- my OSX system displays the colour correctly (reporting 256 for num_colors()) while Linux is reporting 8 colours.

That's coming from system("tput colors") reporting 8 colours, even though this is definitely not an 8 colour terminal.

Forcing the terminal type by running

TERM=xterm-256color tput colors

gives the right number. Likewise,

TERM=xterm-256color Rscript -e 'message(crayon::make_style("hotpink")("asdfa"))'

prints the pink correctly. So while this is definitely a configuration issue, this suggests that this 8 colour reporting/256 colour capability configuration is typical. This SO answer might provide a less stringent test, as it seems likely that 256 colour support will be more common than 8 colour support this century 😄

[gaborcsardi]

Thanks for the links. The thing is, the method suggested in the SO answer does not work for me on OSX, in iterm. :/ I think if you know that your terminal supports 256 colors, you can just set TERM accordingly. This is the simplest solution, and I suspect that it is the only safe one that works on all platforms.

[richfitz]

What would happen if rather than getting the result of tput just assuming 256? Is there even an 8 colour terminal easily available to see how it looks? Being able to rely in >8 colours makes using the package a lot easier (otherwise all end users will have to set TERM, even if it's several dependencies deep). I can dig around and see what the node packages for this do if that's useful. Or you can keep the current behaviour, which I agree is probably safest.

[gaborcsardi]

What would happen if rather than getting the result of tput just assuming 256?

I have no idea.

Is there even an 8 colour terminal easily available to see how it looks?

Emacs is surely 8 color.

Being able to rely in >8 colours makes using the package a lot easier (otherwise all end users will have to set TERM, even if it's several dependencies deep).

I can default to 256 if TERM is xterm. I guess this solves most issues. But then I need a mechanism to fall back to 8 colors.

I can dig around and see what the node packages for this do if that's useful.

This is what the most popular node package does: https://github.com/chalk/supports-color/blob/master/index.js

So how about defaulting to 256 if TERM is xterm?

[richfitz]

In emacs, when forcing 256 colours with:

crayon::make_style("hotpink", colors=256)

I get unstyled output, which doesn't seem too tragic a failing.

Looks like node is going with 8 colours with xterm. And apparently setting TERM is liable to cause unspecified things. What a mess.

[gaborcsardi]

Please reopen if you have issues.