util: use magenta;bold

[refack]

• Default Powershell on Windows setting remap
  ANSI magenta to the color of the background

Microsoft will not/can not change the palette remapping on all installed instances of Windows, but we can use magenta;bold instead of regular magenta 🤷‍♂️

Fixes: #14243

Checklist

• make -j4 test (UNIX), or vcbuild test (Windows) passes
• commit message follows commit guidelines

Affected core subsystem(s)

repl,util

[refack]

Apparently this is not tested IMHO it should.

[mscdex]

Doesn't this change affect non-Windows too? This color will now stand out like a sore thumb compared to the others since none of the others are bolded? I'm not sure that is a good idea...

[gibfahn]

Microsoft will not/can not change the palette remapping on all installed instances of Windows

Have Microsoft said they're not willing to change the default anywhere?

[refack]

Doesn't this change affect non-Windows too? This color will now stand out like a sore thumb compared to the others since none of the others are bolded? I'm not sure that is a good idea...

I'm not sure either... Looking for feedback...

[refack]

Have Microsoft said they're not willing to change the default anywhere?

This wierdsnes was intentional PowerShell/PowerShell#4266 (comment), and is not directly part of Powershell, but is part of the deatult user setting.
I did not hear anything about future plans explicitly, but all current installations won't be changed.

[targos]

On Fedora.
Before:

After:

[refack]

On default windows console:

Before

After

I'd say 3/5 on the sore thumb scale (also the default ANSI 35 (128,0,128) seems very dark)

[joyeecheung]

In the default terminal of MacOS,

before:

after:

both look good enough since the default background is white...

[joyeecheung]

BTW this does stand out a bit if you put this alongside other types, but then only dates use magenta and the ISO format already stands out itself..in the end I guess most people would not care that much as long as the colors are different from each other...

[gibfahn]

I think I'm -1 on doing this, especially for all platforms. On some terminals the difference between normal and bold is pretty pronounced, and bold is normally used to highlight things.

Is there a way to just do it for Windows?

I also somewhat agree with @bnoordhuis's point in #14243 (comment)

It's the responsibility of the console to display that as purple / magenta.

so I'd like to be sure that Microsoft have 0 intention of fixing this (!!!) before we do this.

[silverwind]

Also would like to see this only applied on Windows, boldening just one color would be inconsistent on other platforms (And I personally dislike the bold style in Mintty so much that I'm maintaining a fork of it that disables bold styles).

[refack]

@nodejs/platform-windows @Fishrock123 @addaleax Do we actually want this?

tl;dr

On windows the default shortcut that launches the Powershell console, remaps ANSI color 35 (magenta) and uses it as the background.
BTW: That happens only when PS is run by double clicking the shortcut. Explicitly calling powershell.exe doesn't have this problem.

[refack]

CI: https://ci.nodejs.org/job/node-test-commit/11279/

[refack]

Made it so magenta;bold is only used on Windows, which made me realize this will also solve the issue:

require('util').inspect.styles.date = 'yellow' // Or whatever

[silverwind]

BTW, this will still affect alternate terminals (hyper, mintty, console2, ...) on Windows. Maybe a better fix would be to detect PS, maybe through a environment variable?

[silverwind]

This won't work for anything the user logs.

[refack]

Are logs a problem?

[silverwind]

I'm saying a proper "fix" would be to intercept any write to stdout and replace the non-bold sequence with the bold one.

[silverwind]

OTOH, such an rewrite of colors can be considered breaking. Probably better to not go that route and instead make sure we don't print that magenta, and maybe that modules like chalk workaround it until PS fixes it.

[refack]

I don't see anything obvious to gate on:
https://www.diffchecker.com/2NcaNnts

[silverwind]

Hmm yeah, probably can't distinguish PS from cmd by environment alone, thought it might not be too bad to go off PSModulePath. That one shouldn't be defined in Git Bash or Cygwin at least, while still affecting things like Hyper.

Overall, I'm strongly feeling that this is better fixed on PowerShell's side, or at least users should be instructed to change the default colors.

[refack]

Hmm yeah, probably can't distinguish PS from cmd by environment alone, thought it might not be too bad to go off PSModulePath. That one shouldn't be defined in Git Bash or Cygwin at least, while still affecting things like Hyper.

FWIW I found a tiny change; process.env.PathExt.include('.cpl') is auto added in PS...

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/reference/5.1/microsoft.powershell.management/show-controlpanelitem

[BridgeAR]

Ping @refack

[silverwind]

Typo deafult

[silverwind]

So I see two routes forward here:

1. Add all bold colors to util.inspect.colors and then change the default for dates to the bold variant. This color change should be done on all platforms to stay consistent.

2. Wait for Microsoft to fix their stuff. I'm not even sure it's worth documenting the issue as it applies to all CLI programs that print non-bold magenta. I'd much prefer this solution.

[refack]

Closing in favor of manual util.inspect.styles.date = 'bold' workaround.