How about colors and terminal graphics in std.format?

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 3/11/12 9:16 PM, Chad J wrote:
> I remember doing colored terminal output in Python. It was pretty nifty,
> and allows for some slick CLI design. I think D can do better by putting
> it in the standard library.
>
> I was thinking something along the lines of this:
> http://www.chadjoan.com/d/dmd.2.058/html/d/phobos/std_format.html
>
> I figure it would probably be easy to get some of the basics down. More
> advanced stuff would probably involve messing with terminfo or <term.h>.
> Windows' (terribly bad) command prompt can have some of these
> capabilities implemented too, but in a roundabout way because Windows
> defines API functions that need to be called to affect terminal graphics
> and coloring. I figure that would require the help of the I/O routines
> if I were to work on that.
>
> If there's interest, I might take a stab at it.
>
> So, would this sort of thing make it in?

I don't know, seems interesting but I wonder how portable that could be. 
Probably I'd define a more general means a la %q to mean "send a control 
sequence" and then would define control sequences as functions or constants.

> Oh, on an unrelated note, Phobos' documentation make target is quite
> broken:
> blahblah/dmd.git/src/phobos $ make -fposix.mak html
> make: *** No rule to make target `../web/phobos-prerelease/index.html',
> needed by `html'. Stop.
>
> I examined the makefile and concocted this line of bash that constructs
> my desired html file:
> dmd -m32 -d -c -o- -version=StdDdoc -I../druntime/import std/format.d
> std.ddoc -Dfstd_format.html
> and copied std.ddoc from a release version of dmd (it's in src/phobos).

Since recently the Phobos doc build is meant to be driven from the site 
build. I'll fix the standalone thing because it's useful too, just I 
don't know when.



Andrei