Color and Environment

Color & Environment

Columbus is built to behave well in terminals, pipes, and CI.

Streams

• stdout — results (safe to pipe, including --json).
• stderr — diagnostics, warnings, and errors.

Color resolution order

Color in text mode is decided by the first matching rule:

1. --no-color flag → color off
2. NO_COLOR env set → off
3. FORCE_COLOR env set → on
4. TERM=dumb → off
5. CI env set → off
6. Otherwise → on only if stdout is a TTY

So piping to a file or another program drops color automatically, and CI logs stay clean — without any flags.

columbus search foo --no-color      # force plain
NO_COLOR=1 columbus search foo      # same, via env
FORCE_COLOR=1 columbus search foo | less -R   # keep color through a pager

Data directory

COLUMBUS_DATA_DIR overrides where the database lives (see Configuration).

Environment variables

Variable	Effect
COLUMBUS_DATA_DIR	Override the data directory
NO_COLOR	Disable color
FORCE_COLOR	Force color on
CI	Treated as non-interactive (color off)
TERM=dumb	Color off
XDG_DATA_HOME	Linux data dir base (if COLUMBUS_DATA_DIR unset)

Related

Output Modes · Configuration