Adopt a tool for managing colour of console text

[shirakaba]

So far we're using Node.js primitives, but it's kinda gross so we should migrate to something like chalk (or better).

[lindskogen]

Maybe we could try using console.log formatted strings?

console.log("%chello", "color: blue")

Edit: I found ANSIS which supposedly supports node/bun/deno https://github.com/webdiscus/ansis

[shirakaba]

Hmm, I'm not clear whether console.log formatted strings are standardised. Sounds like, at least many years back, each browser handled it differently, and Node.js would be another case altogether.

So let's use a library that formalises it, yeah 👍

• ansis: "Smaller and faster than chalk" does sound good. Recently updated, and used by thousands is good. Just surprised by its low number of GitHub stars.
• kleur - made by Luke Edwards, is a good sign. Speed isn't a major requirement for us (this won't be used for HTTP server logging or anything, but good to see it's a priority. One downside is that the last release was two years ago, but it has no subdeps to go stale, and this is the kind of thing that could very easily reach a feature-complete state. Supports only 8 colours, but we only need as many as CocoaPods anyway. I'd expect it to support Node/Bun/Deno just due to their standard interop.
• A bunch of other competitors compared here (on ansis's docs). The comparison is a bit out of date, as kleur now supports nested strings, too.

I think, given that as many as 12.9 million repos use kleur and yet it has only 7 open issues (none being bugs), it seems to be a solid choice. The package (2.7KB) is a little smaller than ansis (3.5KB), too. I think let's go with kleur!

[shirakaba]

I've integrated kleur now! 🥳

[webdiscus]

@shirakaba,

ansis has few stars on GitHub because this package has very few visitors on GitHub.
Perhaps most developers uses already "old school" packages, like chalk since 10-5-3 years and do not need new ones.

P.S. You can see the features comparison and benchmarks of most popular terminal colors libraries:
ansis, chalk, kleur, kolorist, colors.js, colorette, picocolors, ansi-colors, cli-color, colors-cli