Colour code text output for clarity

[darrelmiller]

The output from commands, while helpful, can be challenging to read in some cases.

Could we consider colour coding different types of response output?

[baywet]

We can, but I need some details. Error red, success white, hint blue? Some of them are already used by the logger.
What should happen if the terminal has a fancy color scheme?

[baywet]

From a quick search there are a couple of considerations to think of went playing with colours in console apps (asides from accessibility).

Most modern terminals support AINSI colors, but not all (windows cmd host didn't support it until a couple of years ago).
https://www.jerriepelser.com/blog/using-ansi-color-codes-in-net-console-apps/

Regardless of the colours we pick, the terminal might/should remap them to a visible colour with its theme. It's not the job of the console app (in fact we don't have access to the terminal theming information)
https://www.ubuntupit.com/best-windows-terminal-themes-and-color-schemes/

e.g. if we decide to write something in black and the background is black, the terminal should map black characters to something like a grey or another colour so the user can see what's being written.

With that in mind, we also need to consider we have logging in place with ILogger, and maybe one day tracing if we implement #1486 on top of Console.Write.
Tracing writes to the terminal in white as far as I can remember from my observability work if a synk to the console is setup.
Logging uses multiple colours, and is enabled by default:

• Red for errors
• Yellow for warning
• white for anything above warning (remapped to blue in the debug console of VS code for example)

My suggestion is to keep that colour scheme for the logger and use the following scheme for Console.Write messages:

• blue for hints
• yellow for warnings (e.g. no matches found with search)
• red for errors, although those will most often be written by the logger
• green for successful status (e.g. generation completed, download done, etc...)
• white for details (search table, info result, search details)

Thoughts?

[darrelmiller]

Yes. Completely agree with the colour suggestions.