No colors, neither in CLI nor in TUI

[dserodio]

I can't get ug to use colors, even when explicitly using --color. It was installed on Mac using Homebrew

$ ug --version
ugrep 6.1.0 aarch64-apple-darwin23.4.0 +neon/AArch64; -P:pcre2jit; -z:zlib,bzip2,lzma,lz4,zstd,brotli,7z,tar/pax/cpio/zip
License: BSD-3-Clause; ugrep user manual: <https://ugrep.com>
Written by Robert van Engelen and others: <https://github.com/Genivia/ugrep>
Ugrep utilizes the RE/flex regex library: <https://github.com/Genivia/RE-flex>

[genivia-inc]

What do these values show?

$ echo $TERM
$ echo $COLORTERM
$ echo $NO_COLOR

Option --color (--color=auto) checks if the TTY supports color when displaying on TTY, whereas --color=always overrides this. It's similar to how GNU/BSD grep check for TTY color.

[dserodio]

$ echo $TERM
xterm-256color
$ echo $COLORTERM
truecolor
echo $NO_COLOR

[dserodio]

For some reason, grep (BSD, macOS default) doesn't use colors by default either, but grep --color and grep --color=auto do.

For ug, even --color=always doesn't use colors

[genivia-inc]

Well, I installed ugrep with Homebrew to check this out, but colors show up fine. Tried with different shells bash, zsh and tcsh to make sure. Perhaps you've changed a .ugrep file to somehow disable colors or add tag to use non-color text tagging of matches.

[genivia-inc]

My comment above is not meant to ignore your question and concern, but I have absolutely no idea why and how this can happen. Try ugrep which does not read a .ugrep file. The NO_COLOR environment variable should be unset or if it is set then it should have no value. If it has a value, then colors will not show,

[dserodio]

Don't worry, I didn't feel ignored, but I have no idea why this is happening. I normally use iTerm2 with zsh (both heavily customized), but I just tried with Terminal.app with a plain bash shell and still no colors. 🤔

I don't have a .ugrep file and NO_COLOR is undefined

$ if test "$NO_COLOR"; then
> echo "NO_COLOR=$NO_COLOR"
> else
> echo undefined
> fi
undefined

[genivia-inc]

The --color=always option overrides environment variable settings and output redirects, except when --tag is used.

Try this: ugrep --color=always --colors='ms=hr' to force match color highlight red.

Colors are also affected by the grep environment variables GREP_COLOR and GREP_COLORS when set.

[dserodio]

Nailed it! 🙌🏼 ugrep --color=always --colors='ms=hr' works!

So I checked that GREP_COLORS is set to 1;32. If I unset it, both ugrep zsh /etc/shells and ug zsh /etc/shells highlight as expected, so the issue seems to be the way ugrep parses this value

[genivia-inc]

I will add a check in the code for this to allow 1;32 without the usual name=value parameter pairs such as mt=1;32. I had already included logic in the code to parse the deprecated GREP_COLOR that is a short form like 1;32, but GREP_COLORS is expected to contain a list of name=value parameters.

Seems logical then to also allow --colors='hg' to set mt=hg without specifying mt=, i.e. highlighted green matches (and you can also use --colors='1;32' of course).

[dserodio]

Thanks so much with your patience troubleshooting this.

My dotfiles are ancient (I started versioning them back in CVS around 2005) so I have no idea where this 1;32 syntax came from. I just removed GREP_COLORS from by dotfiles. Feel free to close this issue now or when (if) you implement the check for this ancient syntax.

Thanks again!

[genivia-inc]

I've update the dev version and plan to release minor patch update 6.1.1 soon.

[genivia-inc]

Released 6.2 with updated legacy grep color support.