Force color output?

[cwaldbieser]

I'd like to use glow to preview markdown output in ranger-fm. However, it seems that when the output is sent to a pipe or redirected to a file, all the ansi codes are stripped off. This seems reasonable when you just want to save the output to a file or perform greps, etc. However, is there some flag to force the ansi codes to be retained?

[cwaldbieser]

After poking around in the code, I noticed that if I explicitly set a style, it will be used regardless of whether or not we're writing to a terminal. That works, but you lose the ability to detect light vs. dark style.

[imericxu]

Setting -s auto worked for a bit but it just stopped working today and only the dark theme is being used (this is also for ranger btw).

[muesli]

-s auto is the default. You want to specify the actual theme, e.g. -s dark.

[imericxu]

Omitting -s in scope.sh just disables all colors. And I don't want it to always be dark; I set up my terminal to sync with my device light/dark theme. I don't know if this is an issue with ranger or glow, but bat detects light and dark fine everywhere.

[varon]

Make sure that COLORTERM is defined in your env-vars and set to truecolor

[Anomalocaridid]

It seems like when using a custom theme, I need to specify the theme every time I want to force color output. The ability to force color output would be very helpful and save me from having to hardcode the path to my custom theme I want in things like shell scripts and aliases rather than just specifying it once in glow's config file.

[caarlos0]

you can force by setting CLICOLOR_FORCE=1, and in addition you might want to set COLORTERM=truecolor to have truecolor enabled as well.

[AndydeCleyre]

This seems to be new behavior since 2.0 I guess, whereas previously specifying a style was enough to ensure use of that style when piped. IMO it's worth a note on the GH release item.

[AndydeCleyre]

Although it's using a different (less readable) color scheme when piped, even though the color scheme (dark) is specified on the command line.

[folliehiyuki]

Although it's using a different (less readable) color scheme when piped

This is because when terminal output is not detected, and CLICOLOR_FORCE=1 is set, termenv will use ANSI 4-bit color profile. See https://github.com/muesli/termenv/blob/82936c5ea257b458deb5238e6093773b42c43773/termenv.go#L104.

[AndydeCleyre]

Should it instead reuse the logic from https://github.com/muesli/termenv/blob/master/termenv_unix.go#L23 ? That checks TERM and COLORTERM as well as a list of known terminal emulators.

[mgnsk]

I've also had this issue for some time now. Since 1407793, colors broke when glow is used as an fzf previewer.

Here's an example

Test file:

# _Italic title_

Script:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

function preview {
	# broken since commit 1407793
	# before commit 1407793, I was using this command:
	# glow --style=auto "$1"

	# half-broken since commit 1407793, italic text but no color
	# glow --style=dark "$1"

	# almost works since 1407793 but wrong colors
	export CLICOLOR_FORCE=1
	export COLORTERM=truecolor
	glow --style=dark "$1"
}

export -f preview

fzf --preview "bash -c 'preview {}'"

How it looked before with glow --style=auto "$1":

How it looks now with CLICOLOR_FORCE=1 COLORTERM=truecolor glow --style=dark "$1":

[meowgorithm]

Oof, thanks for the heads up @AndydeCleyre and @mgnsk. This looks like a regression. Mind opening an issue accordingly?

[ostap-tymchenko]

Has anyone found any solutions? I'm trying to use glow for markdown editing via watch -c -n 1 CLICOLOR_FORCE=1 glow DOC.md --style dracula but I'm getting no luck. Just colorless output

[meowgorithm]

Just a note that we're chatting about the issue here: #654.

@caarlos0 just a note that it looks like CLICOLOR_FORCE=1 COLORTERM=truecolor no longer work together.