Ansi output is visible in shell when running hledger

[olimorris]

When I run hledger in my terminal I'm seeing lots of ansi output:

Additional information:

• Installed via Homebrew
• hledger 1.29.1, mac-aarch64
• I am using Kitty 0.27.1 and tmux 3.3a
• Running hledger test I see All 220 tests passed (0.04s)
• Running echo $LANG I see en_GB.UTF-8
• Trying this in the standard macOS Terminal.app also shows the same

[simonmichael]

Thanks for the report. If I understand rightly, you see this just running hledger in Apple's Terminal.app, with no tmux involved ?

As a temporary workaround you can export NO_COLOR=1 or alias hledger='hledger --color=no'.

[olimorris]

Thanks for the report. If I understand rightly, you see this just running hledger in Apple's Terminal.app, with no tmux involved ?

That's correct. I'll try recreating in a GitHub Action too.

As a temporary workaround you can export NO_COLOR=1 or alias hledger='hledger --color=no'.

👍🏼️

[simonmichael]

Hmm, I can't reproduce then. How about in iTerm if you have that ? I wonder if I configured Terminal in some way I've forgotten ? Can anyone else reproduce ?

[simonmichael]

Macos Monterey 12.6.2 here.

[simonmichael]

I see.. it works for me because I have less configured to render ANSI sequences (LESS environment variable contains R). Hmm. Seeing the bold headings is pleasant, but I'm not sure if we can safely detect when to show them.

[simonmichael]

Workaround for now: perhaps export LESS=R$LESS fixes it ? I use export LESS=EFRSWX.

[simonmichael]

We could:

• show no ANSI ever by default, and require an opt-in HLEDGER_COLOR=1 var to turn it on. People doing that would be responsible for also configuring their $PAGER to show ANSI.
• keep showing ANSI by default, and get Add the color flag to less pharpend/pager#1 released or ship it ourselves, so when it is sent to $PAGER there's a better chance it will work (it would call less -R or more, both of which apparently show ANSI). People who have PAGER customised to something else might still see the problem.
• add R to $LESS in hledger's program environment at startup. Equivalent to the above ? Would solve the problem for the common case, but not for every possible custom PAGER.

[simonmichael]

I went with the third option - add R to $LESS (and $MORE) at startup. And added a https://hledger.org/dev/hledger.html#paging doc.

[olimorris]

Thanks so much for persevering with this. Can confirm that trying export LESS=EFRSWX fixed it for me!