Can I force colour output?

[DDzwiedziu]

Pretty much as in the title. I want to have the possibility to render the ghistory output trough tools like ansilove, ansigo, ansitoimg, textimg, etc. to an image. The issue is the detection of pipes, and while many tools have options like grep or ls --color=always, for Taskwarrior I've only seen +nocolor.

Example output of textimg:

Edit: and I've answered myself looking more around the topic. unbuffer from the expect suite.
unbuffer task ghistory.daily end.after:tomorrow-1wk | textimg -o result.png && feh result.png:

Edit 2: sources: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/577106/shell-output-text-to-png-while-preserving-color

[djmitche]

Indeed, task when piped sees that its stdout is not a terminal and disables color. unbuffer is new to me but seems like a good fix!

[DDzwiedziu]

Yes, will try to mail myself a few to test later.

Marked your comment as an answer, to show this topic as answered.

[linuxcaffe]

There's also RC override _forcecolor=on. (See man taskrc for exact syntax)

…

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[DDzwiedziu]

And it came in useful, as there seems to be a problem with unbuffer in crontab.

See https://superuser.com/q/1935535/1869347 for details.

[smemsh]

So rc.color=1 only works if stdout isatty(), unless rc._forcecolor?

Perhaps Taskwarrior could use stdin instead of stdout for isatty()? This might work right. It means the user is interacting at a terminal, and probably the pipe can handle it. 'ls' and 'grep' both test stdout however, just looked. Maybe the descriptor to test could be configurable?

It looks like I always add _forcecolor=1 for routine task use and put this directly in rcfile. Then I add _forcecolor=0 to the few places where I scrape something. So that bypasses isatty() anyways, hrm...

[djmitche]

I think the _forcecolor option is the right level of configurability. By comparison things like grep have --color={always,auto,never}, and _forcecolor is essentially the same as always.

Unfortunately we use typed config, so I think it would be fairly tricky to support rc.color={always,auto,never} as well as rc.color=1. But if that can be implemented without unreasonable hacks, it might be a good improvement.