The Great Console Unification

[nblumhardt]

From serilog-archive/serilog-sinks-literate#17.

We've now had experience with three different console sink designs, this one, ColoredConsole and LiterateConsole.

Each has strengths and weaknesses; for example, literate has nice presentation, but Console can accept a custom formatter and produce valid JSON if required.

It's time to unify all of these. There are, as always, options. A strawman proposal:

• Extend this sink (Serilog.Sinks.Console) so that it supports everything we would like it to (as a 3.0/breaking change release)
• Make Serilog.Sinks.ColoredConsole and Serilog.Sinks.LiterateConsole into thin wrappers around Serilog.Sinks.Console that configure it with default palettes/formatting options to achieve (mostly?) the original output of those sinks
• Mark WriteTo.LiterateConsole() and WriteTo.ColoredConsole(), and the corresponding NuGet packages, obsolete, directing users to WriteTo.Console()

Things I think we want without doubt:

• All of the currently-available options in the three existing sinks:
  • Typical formatting options: message template or custom ITextFormatter, culture
  • Standard minimum level configuration
  • Minimum-level-to-STDERR
• Palette control
  • By default, should look roughly like the current literate console (but we might update the color scheme, e.g. along the lines of VSCode?)
  • By default, uses ANSI color codes and make sure presentation is first-class in cmd.exe, bash (dark) and PowerShell (default blue) terminals
  • Custom ANSI and Windows palette implementations (LiterateConsole and ColoredConsole might use Windows ones by default, but we'd strongly encourage ANSI through docs/examples)
  • Selectable built-in "no color" palette
• Support for {Properties}
• Support for {Message:l} (this would probably be in the default template, since color would also be on by default, making property value delimiters (") redundant

Stretch/later goals:

• Some level palette control via XML/JSON configuration (perhaps just choosing color/no-color, or palette-by-Type)

Other thoughts:

• Do we want to keep using the default "Serilog-style" rendering of things like dictionaries and StructureValue, or would the output be more predictable/meaningful for people if we instead printed complex values as (syntax-highlighted) JSON?

[adamchester]

👍

[adamchester]

Do we want to keep using the default "Serilog-style"

I would be OK with printing highlighted JSON, it's easier to copy/paste/manipulate and more predictable for users I think.

[frg]

Is the release date for these known, yet? Great work on this! :)

[merbla]

@frg sorry, no date as yet. With serilog/serilog#977 merged it opens up other sinks to start some required changes.

[nblumhardt]

Hoping to have some time to push this forward in the next day or two, but it'll be a while until it's ready. There are some non-trivial weaknesses in LiterateConsole that need to be resolved in the unified version :-)

[frg]

@nblumhardt Great news! 👍

[nblumhardt]

On NuGet now in 3.0.0-dev-00732

[nblumhardt]

Any and all testing/validation appreciated, BTW :-)

[Noctis-]

Time flies ...last time i've looked at these V2 was breaking our V1 things ... and here we are ... V3, and we didn't have the time to update :)
Good work 👍