No_color: Disabling ANSI color output in various Unix commands

In the meantime, I have a janky (s)trip (c)olor function in my .bashrc to help with this:

  function sc
  {
    sed "s,$(printf '\033')\\[[0-9;]*[a-zA-Z],,g"   
  }

I wish programs would not colorize. I find that I much prefer post-processing program output to colorize how I please, especially since I may want much better coloring/styling (e.g. mix of foreground/background, bold, underline, and more than basic red/green color choices). Of course, this requires that output has enough semantic clues in the text to colorize meaningfully; that’s a good thing anyway, since it makes the command more flexible for any other purpose like chaining Unix commands.

I have two functions I use to switch between color and no color. One function also fixes the terminal if I read binary by mistake. I guess I could call them color and nocolor. Edit as required. There's probably a better way to do this. Old habits and such.

    function sane()
    {
    LANG="C";LC_ALL="C";LC_CTYPE="C";export LANG LC_ALL LC_CTYPE;
    S_TIME_FORMAT=ISO;export S_TIME_FORMAT;
    TERM=vt102;export TERM;
    unset IFS;
    stty sane;
    tput rs1;
    echo -e "\033c";
    reset;
    clear;
    set -o posix;
    }

    function utf()
    {
    LANG="en_US.UTF-8";LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"; LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8";export LANG LC_ALL LC_CTYPE
    TERM=xterm;export TERM
    }

And there I am wanting the opposite ;)

This is good, it should be submitted as an RFC + track implementation on upstream projects.

The amount of color in modern command line tools is annoying!

Sometimes TERM=vt100 helps.

Good idea, especially for parsing program output. It's also not uncommon to find yourself accessing a server through some terminal that doesn't support ANSI colours properly and it ends up breaking.