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Comment by alrs | Hacker News Reader

For tools that don't honor NO_COLOR, I have a filter called nofun, which gets rid of color and animations.

I hope the author of the article sees this, because this is absolutely the best solution to what they want to do.

I'm sure you can even do some clever bash-foo to run your term sessions through it, like how screen or tmux work.

It works on stdout when using a pipe output, but it won't work with interactive apps using rich terminal capabilities and ncurses.

What would prevent it from working with ncurses programs?

Do we even need NO_COLOR if this works as promised?

Why prefer

  NO_COLOR=true command

over

  command | nofun

The latter seems both cleaner to me and it doesn’t require modification of all existing CLI programs to work.

Because you can set NO_COLOR=true in your shell config and not have to type it ever again.

but you can set also an alias for the solution above and dont depend on wether the tool supports the ENV var or not

But then you need to alias every single command

You can also pipe it through

    sed 's/\x1b\[[;0-9]*m//g'

As noted in the repo README:

> One could do this with GNU sed, but developers working in proprietary operating systems don't have GNU sed.

You can also use col -bx

Neat. col -bx leaves more artifacts lying around, but it does get the job done.