Console colours printed as special characters on Windows about typedb-console HOT 14 CLOSED

I think this is of higher priority, @jmsfltchr @lolski. This affects the user experience at the first point of entry. @vmax can you take this on?

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My suspicion is that Windows have their own colour code characters.

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@jmsfltchr @haikalpribadi @lolski I did a few tests on Windows and can confirm it's indeed an issue if you use CMD or PowerShell

However, there's a simple workaround that our users could do: use modern Windows Terminal!

To ease the pain of those who don't use it, I suggest we add an argument to Console binary named --nocolor (or --color=no), which, as name suggests, would skip printing the escape codes.

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Can we detect the terminal at bootup of the console application and configure the colour options, @vmax ? Having to manually add the argument by the user feels clunky and not elegant.

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@haikalpribadi @lolski I verified it's possible to know if we're running under Windows Terminal by checking WT_SESSION presence of environment variable, ref. Therefore the heuristic for determining if we want to show colors would be:

if OS == Windows:
    if environment variable WT_SESSION is present:
        show colors
    else
        show colors
else:
    show colors

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Where should you implement this heuristic, @vmax ? Do you know how to implement it?

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@haikalpribadi os detection would probably go into @graknlabs_common; logic on enabling/disabling colors goes into Console. Yup, I'll implement this one.

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I think it would be better if we can identify the OS in Java, and then configure the default colour setting also in Java, @vmax. I think that would be much cleaner. Is that possible?

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@haikalpribadi all of the logic would be in Java, no doubt - it's just which Java package to put it one. Sorry I wasn't clear on this one; when I said @graknlabs_common I in fact meant https://github.com/graknlabs/common/tree/master/util (not grakn or grakn.bat scripts)

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Ah okay. Good. Let's do the logic in Java. Put the class in grakn.common.util.. Use the library in Console to determine if it should output colour.

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Detecting if a user's terminal supports colours is actually pretty involved. Here's one (NodeJS based) tool designed to perform such detection: https://github.com/chalk/supports-color

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well, I think we can just detect the OS like how max suggests above, right, @alexjpwalker ?

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It's not an OS-specific issue, but a terminal-specific one. The terminal I use most often when developing in Windows is the terminal built into Visual Studio Code, which does support colours - including on Windows.

So the most correct solution here is terminal detection, which - granted - is a little more involved than OS detection, @haikalpribadi

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@haikalpribadi we went for a better and easier solution which just allows to print colors on Windows.

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