Re: color by default

On Tue, Dec 31, 2019 at 8:35 AM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> Peter Eisentraut <peter(dot)eisentraut(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> > With the attached patch, I propose to enable the colored output by
> > default in PG13.
>
> FWIW, I shall be setting NO_COLOR permanently if this gets committed.
> I wonder how many people there are who actually *like* colored output?
> I find it to be invariably less readable than plain B&W text.
>
>
I find color massively useful for grep and its variants, where the hit can
show up anywhere on the line. It was also kind of useful for git,
especially "git grep", but on my current system git's colorizing seems
hopelessly borked, so I had to turn it off.

But I turned PG_COLOR on and played with many commands, and must say I
don't really see much of a point. When most of these command fail, they
only generate a few lines of output, and it isn't hard to spot the error
message. When pg_restore goes wrong, you get a lot of messages but
colorizing them isn't really helpful. I don't need 'error' to show up in
red in order to know that I have a lot of errors, especially since the
lines which do report errors always have 'error' as the 2nd word on the
line, where it isn't hard to spot. If it could distinguish the important
errors from unimportant errors, that would be more helpful. But if it
could reliably do that, why print the unimportant ones at all?

It doesn't seem like this is useful enough to have it on by default, and
without it being on by default there is no point in having NO_COLOR to turn
if off. There is something to be said for going with the flow, but the
"emerging standard" seems like it has quite a bit further to emerge before
I think that would be an important reason.

Cheers,

Jeff