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Comment by skydhash | Hacker News Reader

Anything that pulled in chalk. You need a very good reason to emit escape sequences. The whole npm (and rust, python,..) ecosystem assumes that if it’s a tty, then it’s a full blown xterm-256color terminal. And then you need to pipe to cat or less to have sensible output.

So if you’re adding chalk, that generally means you don’t know jack about terminals.

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In the Python world, people often enough use Rich so that they can put codes like [red] into a string that are translated into the corresponding ANSI. The end user pays several megabytes for this by default, as Rich will also pull in Pygments, which is basically a collection of lexers for various programming languages to enable syntax highlighting. They also pay for a rather large database of emoji names, a Markdown parser, logic for table generation and column formatting etc. all of which might go unused by someone who just doesn't want to remember \e[31m (or re-create the lookup table and substitution code).

Exactly! ANSI escape codes are old and well defined for all the basic purposes.

Pulling in a huge library just to set some colors is like hiring a team of electrical contractors to plug in a single toaster.

Some people appreciate it when terminal output is easier to read.

If chalk emits sequences that aren't supported by your terminal, then that's a deficiency in chalk, not the programs that wanted to produce colored output. It's easier to fix chalk than to fix 50,000 separate would-be dependents of chalk.

I appreciate your frustration but this isn't an answer to the question. The question is about implementing the same feature in two different ways, dependency or internal code. Whether a feature should be added is a different question.

Chalk appears to be a great example.

I wonder how many devs are pulling in a whole library just to add colors. ANSI escape sequences are as old as dirt and very simple.

Just make some consts for each sequence that you intend to use. That's what I do, and it typically only adds a dozen or so lines of code.

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