Help formatting in terminal

[waldekmastykarz]

Update headings in help to be formatted as bold and uppercase in the terminal.

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I've been experimenting with different ways of formatting help in the terminal, specifically, using bold for headings which seems to be convention in man pages. Here are the results:

Bold + uppercase

Bold

For reference, here's the current format (uppercase, regular)

Which option do you like the most @pnp/cli-for-microsoft-365-maintainers?

[milanholemans]

Using bold headings is a great addition @waldekmastykarz!
If I have to pick one, I'd go for just bold. In that sample, I see the URL in the query description is underlined in blue. Does this mean that it's clickable or something?

[Jwaegebaert]

+1 on the bold front. I'm also very intrigued if that link is clickable. A bit of color in the help output would be a great addition.

[waldekmastykarz]

The clickable link is my bad: while taking the screenshot I had my mouse pointer hovering over the URL and my terminal turned it into a link.

[waldekmastykarz]

I like the bold formatting as well! Let's give others a couple of days to respond and we can take it from there 👍

[Adam-it]

only bold looks cool enugh 🤩. @waldekmastykarz awesome suggestion 👍
BTW white terminal? now I've seen everything 😅

[waldekmastykarz]

My terminal automatically switches between dark and light mode, just as VSCode and any other app that's capable of it 😎

[Adam-it]

My terminal automatically switches between dark and light mode, just as VSCode and any other app that's capable of it 😎

the auto dark mode app rocks 🤩... I do the same with everything except the terminal 😅

[waldekmastykarz]

Evidence in dark mode:

[martinlingstuyl]

I like the bold plus uppercase best. I feel it stands out just a little better compared to the just bold variant.

[waldekmastykarz]

OK, So far we've got:

• bold (Milan, (not)Jasey, Adam)
• bold+upper (Martin, Mathijs, Waldek, Nico)
• keep current 0

I like both bold and bold+upper but if had to choose one, I'd go with bold+upper 😊

[MathijsVerbeeck]

Personally, I'd prefer the bold+upper.

[nicodecleyre]

I'm also in favor for the bold + uppercase

[nicodecleyre]

+1 on the bold front. I'm also very intrigued if that link is clickable. A bit of color in the help output would be a great addition.

Speaking of using colors in the terminal, there is something like glow

[waldekmastykarz]

+1 on the bold front. I'm also very intrigued if that link is clickable. A bit of color in the help output would be a great addition.

Speaking of using colors in the terminal, there is something like glow

Correct, it's a lib written in Go for use with scripts. Nothing we can integrate in CLI unfortunately.

[milanholemans]

OK, So far we've got:

* bold (Milan, Jasey, Adam)

* bold+upper (Martin, Mathijs, Waldek, Nico)

* keep current 0

I forgot to mention that I have right of veto, sorry guys 😊

[waldekmastykarz]

Anyone? Anyone else? 😄

[TotallyNotJasey]

Hi, totally new here. I would also go for the option bold.
Have a nice day gents 🎩

[waldekmastykarz]

Seems like bold+upper it is. Since our text output is not an API, we can always adjust the output if we learn something new.

[nicodecleyre]

I'm interested in giving this a go

[nicodecleyre]

Hi all,

When trying to resolve this issue I used escape codes to make the titles go bold in the console.log. A list of these codes can be found here.

I played around with it a bit and it seems that this also can be used to display colors if we would want to (i'm not saying that we should 😄 )

A couple of examples:

• The title in another color:
  

• dim the code in the response block:
  

Just wanted to let you guys know this

[milanholemans]

Thank you for sharing @nicodecleyre!
In the past we used to have colors in our docs printout but we stepped away from it. Can't really remember why, maybe because it might give issues when you have terminal themes. For example blue text will be extremely hard to read in a blue PowerShell window. And because people can style their own terminal, it's nearly impossible to create a color palette that works for all I guess.