Add an option to force color output

[SuperSandro2000]

When I pipe duf into less I want to preserve colors. Currently there is no option for that. Could an option like --color or --color=always be added?

[muesli]

Yeah, that's probably a good idea. I wonder if there's a global, existing environment variable for such a setting.

[SuperSandro2000]

I wonder if there's a global, existing environment variable for such a setting.

Not that I know of or could find on the fast.

[muesli]

Thanks for the research!. I think --color(=true) is good enough in this case.

[lfuelling]

That use-case applies to watch as well imo.

[muesli]

Just occurred to me that setting COLORTERM to truecolor should already achieve that. I guess that's the environment variable I was looking for.

[jrwren]

COLORTERM=truecolor doesn't seem to force color when output isn't a tty, e.g. when piping to less. --color(=true) still seems like a good idea.

[muesli]

@jrwren Oops, you're right, of course!

[muesli]

Slight improvement and just a small heads up: you can enforce colored output by setting CLICOLOR_FORCE to true. There's still an issue: this will default to 256 ANSI colors instead of the RGB output.

[gsmitheidw]

For some reason, on two systems I use - duf isn't producing any native colour. Can't understand why because colours in other programs and scripts are working fine (bash, exa, midnight commander etc). I can cheat doing stuff like this:

duf | less -R | ccze -A

But I don't understand why colours aren't working on some systems (both Debian based).

(less -R will preseve colours by the way for anybody who is finding colour codes instead of colour output)

[muesli]

@gsmitheidw Which terminal are you using? Could you please report the value of these environment variables: TERM, COLORTERM.

[gsmitheidw]

These aren't set on one system and are blank on the other:

  $ export | grep COLOR 
  declare -x COLOR
  declare -x COLORTERM

Maybe that's the issue, although duf colours are working on other systems they're not set so I don't know.

[bionade24]

Why is COLORTERM=truecolor set in one tmux window but not on the remote machine?

[muesli]

I've improved the color detection & output a bit and verified these settings should always work with the latest changes in duf:

# Enforce RGB / 24-bit color mode
CLICOLOR_FORCE=1 COLORTERM="truecolor" duf

# Enforce 8-bit / 256 color mode
CLICOLOR_FORCE=1 COLORTERM="yes" duf

Color output is however still limited to basic ANSI colors when printing to something other than a tty.

I'll close this issue as I think this is probably a good enough solution. Disagree? Let me know! 😃

[bionade24]

Seems to work now after enforcing the 2 env vars. But from a pure technical aspect, I still wonder my liquidprompt, fd, bat & other tools don't have a problem without those vars at all and behave the same as if they weren't in a shell opened via ssh will duf thinks the terminal doesn't support colors. Both Term windows are still have TERM=screen just as shown in the picture above.

[muesli]

@bionade24 Thanks for the feedback! I've just created a PR on termenv that should enable screen sessions to always support the ANSI256 profile: muesli/termenv#68

That means you won't have to set these env vars anymore in a future duf release.

[nafg]

Could this be documented in --help?