Consider switching to anstyle for our terminal styling and color needs

[obi1kenobi]

Tangential comment. Please disregard since it's only for future note.*

The recommended SOTA color-related logic is to use the rust-cli/anstyle crates.*

Originally posted by @pksunkara in #721 (comment)

It seems that multiple of our dependencies already use anstyle, so we should consider switching to it as well.

[pksunkara]

I can mentor on this issue.

[suaviloquence]

Hi! Thanks for the offer to help! Would common practice be to use the anstyle-termcolor crate or refactor entirely to use the anstream crate?

[pksunkara]

I might be wrong but I consider anstyle-termcolor to be more related to style customization logic.

The color logic we need to clean up here is more about the setup including respecting user's preferences. I have a sample boilerplate for CLIs that sets up everything related to color at https://git.sr.ht/~pksunkara/cli-clap.

There are quite a few important parts such as:

• Reading --color argument, https://git.sr.ht/~pksunkara/cli-clap/tree/master/item/src/main.rs#L38
• Forwarding color choice to logging, https://git.sr.ht/~pksunkara/cli-clap/tree/master/item/src/main.rs#L45
• Outputting text while respecting color choice, https://git.sr.ht/~pksunkara/cli-clap/tree/master/item/src/hello.rs#L24

[pksunkara]

To answer the original question,

Since we must respect the color choices set in various ways (as described in anstyle-query), we must bring in anstream. And then have a generic output function that uses anstyle-termcolor to convert the termcolor usage to anstyle before printing. This is the way people would choose to migrate if they have a lot of places where they need to migrate.

But since, we have only a few places and also use termcolor_output to currently print that we can't easily modify, and we are bringing in anstream anyway, I would recommend the refactor to anstream crate completely.

(Feel free to ping me on Zulip if you want to chat)

[suaviloquence]

just a thought while I work on this - does it make sense to also refactor to use something like the log crate for managing log levels?

so that the end application (the cli for us, and whatever binary crate uses semver-checks) sets color and logging preferences, and the library part of the crate is less aware of these preferences

[pksunkara]

If you want to do that, I would recommend tracing instead (setup and usage)

[suaviloquence]

Added in #737

[obi1kenobi]

Implemented in #737.