Text styling for output (ANSI code)

[Taitava]

Sometimes shell command output might contain control characters that define colors and/or font style (e.g. bold, italic) for parts of the outputted text. This is called ANSI code.

So far, the Shell command plugin has displayed the any possibly outputted ANSI code texts as-is. I.e. the plugin has had no knowledge of it. It has resulted in the following hard to read output messages:

Example shell command: git -c color.ui=always status (shows Git version control status, with color-coding enabled)

Original, ugly output:

Output after converting ANSI code to HTML:

[Taitava]

This is now released, but still lacks documentation.

[Taitava]

Hi @OMSmolina, I'm using this discussion to reply to your comment in issue 329

In output: Ask after execution Ansi colors not working correctly.

Yeah, the Ask after execution modal is actually lagging behind as I didn't notice to pay enough attention to it when developing the ANSI code support. That said, at least the output is still correct. If you click for example the Current file: bottom button in the modal, the outputted content with the HTML formatting will show up correctly in a currently open note file.

A way to solve this would be to make the Ask after execution modal to have a read-only mode, which would show HTML formatting correctly.

[OMSmolina]

Hi @Taitava

Yes, the current file or notification bubble prints the correct colors, but it will also be nice to have them in Ask after execution modal.

The read-only mode option sounds good, to me it should be the default option like any console output.

[Taitava]

Yes, the current file or notification bubble prints the correct colors, but it will also be nice to have them in Ask after execution modal.

I agree.

The read-only mode option sounds good, to me it should be the default option like any console output.

Yes, there will be a setting to decide which will be the default mode for Ask after execution: read-only or editable.

[OMSmolina]

Any news about this?

[Taitava]

Thanks for asking again 🙂 . Sorry, no news yet. This basically requires some redesigning of the Ask after execution modal. I wrote some ideas now to #408 . You can subscribe to the discussion to get notified when there's some progress, but I can't promise when I'll be able to start it.

[Taitava]

Ability to remove ANSI code

@edshamis commented in #329:

It would be nice to have an option to just remove ANSI code

A great idea! I'll plan this for SC 0.23.0 - so not for the next release (0.22.0), but after that. 👍

[Taitava]

Hi @edshamis ! Sorry for the delay, I only just started to briefly look into this ability to remove ANSI code.

• It looks like the ansi_up library the SC plugin uses does not support removing ANSI code completely.
• There has been a feature request for this, but it didn't get implemented at least back then.
• Another library was mentioned that could possible do it: strip-ansi.

I'll need to consider what to do here. Introducing yet another library would not be the most optimal solution, but I guess it's the best in this situation. I'm also doubtful about modifying ansi_up myself for this, if the modification would have no possibilities to become part of the official library.

So, unfortunately I need to remove this feature from the 0.23.0 milestone and postpone this. If the new library looks decent, I might lean in that direction in the future.