> And if folks really just want any use of green to become blue, then yes > you can do that now and there is no reason to change anything further. > Though I kinda doubt that is what folks want when then think about > customization of colors. I expect folks really want more control over > “logger-level-info” is blue or green, similar to how IDEA or Eclipse can > let you configure colors based on context, and not simply doing color > replacements (i.e. everything green is now blue). >
Ok. Maybe we should not export jansi to plugin classpaths' then. We may need to provide a more sophisticated logging API supporting things like color and bold, italic, etc. If plugin developers start using jansi to provide ANSI escapes in log messages we cannot change anything to what they do later. I’d recommend the simple impl to see how the community takes to colors and gather feedback and ideas before doing anything more. I do think if folks are keen to the colors that perhaps a larger change to normalize how output is handled is probably in order, and that is why I didn’t try to go adding ansi directly to the plugin development api yet, but left it just in the logging system. I’m also not sure I’d want to expose ansi sequences directly to plugin development, but perhaps instead using an AnsiRenderer ( https://github.com/fusesource/jansi/blob/master/jansi/src/main/java/org/fusesource/jansi/AnsiRenderer.java ) style abstraction over the streams. Here I could imagine it fairly trivial to externalize the color attributes to a mapping model. I also don’t think that colors should be over-used, so exposing directly as api to all plugins could end up with pretty rainbow vomit on the console which could potentially negate the value of having colors to help signify bad or good things. Adding colors presently is a simple easy way at a glance to see these. But if it was up to each plugin to color as it felt, then the brain power needed to comprehend the output would grow exponentially, unless there was some abstraction over “good”, “bad”, “warning”, etc concepts. * * * In short, I would not recommend jumping directly into making ansi coloring of output part of the api proper and exposing to the community for extension at this time w/o further consideration and planning for how it would impact the platform generally. —jason
