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Show HN: Smallest and fastest command-line coloring library on the internet

github.com

39 pointsmofle13 comments

This appears to be poking a little fun at the recent Chalk/Colorette/Nanocolors drama

What is happening in the linked discussion from the readme:

* https://github.com/babel/babel/pull/13783

I’m not exactly following

From my understanding, a well-known developer stole Colorette code (a node module for CLI colors) and rebranded it as Nanocolors with very minor changes.

Then, the nanocolors creator started going around repos that use Colorette, telling them to switch to Nanocolors.

That's all i know. If anyone wants to make corrections or additions to that please do.

As a correction, they were aiming to replace the usage of Chalk with Nanocolors on the grounds of (questionable) performance improvements.

It started a bit earlier, 2.0 release of colorette introduced breaking changes in color detection. This caused a major fallout with a creator on nanocolors who was a minor contributor and used colorete in some of his popular projects. Most of the comments on the relevant issue are gone now, so we can only guess how heated it was.

The author of nanocolors plagiarized colorette, removing all indication that it was someone else's work, added a few micro-optimizations then encouraged all of their associated libs like postcss/auto-prefixer to use "their" library as an optimization removing chalk. Colorette's author called them out and a bunch of drama ensued.

Really never should have happened in the first place, you'd have to go out of your way to remove all the git history and all that to hide the fact that you copied someone else's work, and then to make a bunch of drama and not own up to it was pretty distasteful.

I really enjoy this style of humor. Especially when mocking micro benchmark culture and all of the weirdness that happens in those measurements.

And fwiw it definitely seems good to call out “bad play” in the community, but a lot of open source is based around clout and “micro-fame”. Not sure what helps that problem.

Wow, the maintainer of the package is an inspiration he has 1,160 packages in npm. One of the packages has almost 10M downloads a week. A lot of them were updated in the last month. Wow!

(He's an inspiration, because that's what happens when you write valuable and usable code)

I'm not sure if that speaks greatly of the author's work--which I'm sure took a lot of effort regardless--or poorly of the fragmented Node ecosystem where micro packages are common.

Having a single maintainer control all those packages also makes him a valuable target for malicious actors.

for node.js.

I'm still thinking what library which can trim whitespace from the left of string is most useful package for node.js

I mean jeez. This can't seriously be the bottleneck of CLI/TUI programs, can it?

It seems like low hanging fruit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

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