[feature request] Add command line color output for Windows

[skjerns]

As requested in #1 , it would be nice to have colored output also for Windows, which should be possible, even though not as easily as in unix.

I don't think I can currently implement it (as I'm also not using PySnooper very often).

[cool-RR]

Cool, we'll wait for someone to volunteer to implement it. Note that it should be implemented without adding dependencies, so if we're using e.g. colorama, we'll need to copy-paste some of their code.

[cool-RR]

If I remember correctly, the reason I didn't implement this when I implemented the same feature for Linux is that there are multiple shells you can run in Windows. (CMD, MSYS bash, Powershell, whatever Windows 10 has going on for running Linux.) I may have tried a solution on a couple of these and got inconsistent results. So figuring out a solution that works for all of these (or at least degrades gracefully) is the main difficulty here.

[cool-RR]

The biggest priority in this feature is that whatever happens, we don't want to send an output with ugly shell escapes to a shell that won't interpret them correctly. That's the main disaster I'm trying to prevent.

[SonGokussj4]

Just found out about PySnooper and it's a lovely library. I'm on Windows (Windows Terminal) and it's a shape it doesn't have colors.
If you want to have some compatibility between shells, what about additional library like colorama or something like that?
Second idea is to have colors.conf and let the user specify possible changes?

[cool-RR]

Thank you. My second message in this thread answers part of your message. In any case, if you want to implement this, go ahead.

[SonGokussj4]

Oh I apologize. I've skimmed through from 1st to 3rd and 4th message.

I see the code where you specify the colors. Will try to experiment a little bit. It's not my strong topic thought :-)
Anyway, have a great day.

P.S. Wouldn't it be possible to have something like like pip install pysnooper[colorama] which would be optional dependency or something like that? And then user can specify in pysnooper.conf if to use colorama or native shell escapes?

[cool-RR]

P.S. Wouldn't it be possible to have something like like pip install pysnooper[colorama] which would be optional dependency or something like that? And then user can specify in pysnooper.conf if to use colorama or native shell escapes?

It would be possible, but it means that for the rest of PySnooper's life I will have to confirm that these two branches work with each new release. The less moving parts, the less maintenace work I have to do.

[Andrej730]

@cool-RR

PySnooper/pysnooper/tracer.py

Lines 265 to 266 in 57472b4

	self.color = color and sys.platform in ('linux', 'linux2', 'cygwin',
	'darwin')

Would it makes sense to set default value for color argument to sys.platform in ('linux', 'linux2', 'cygwin', 'darwin') instead of True? To allow forcing colors on Windows - it seems colors now are more supported on Windows. Currently the feature is disabled on Windows completely.

---

It seems in Windows 11 colors are enabled in cmd by default (testing with py -c "print('\x1b[34mHello, blue text\x1b[0m')"):

Though they are not if console is launched as administrator.

[cool-RR]

@Andrej730 Indeed that would make sense. If you submit a PR, please try to think of the different ways this code could be run, how things might go wrong, and check every one to confirm things don't go wrong.