Decrease dependencies and maintenance burden

[pksunkara]

You can reduce the dependency list by removing ansi_term and ansi_colours since console has the same capability (and more since it handles old windows too).

I haven't looked at other dependencies though.

[sharkdp]

Thank you for the feedback.

The 24-bit => 8-bit color interpolation code comes from bat originally. At some point, we moved it out to a separate ansi_colours crate. Does console really have the same kind of "high quality" 8-bit color interpolation? Or is it some kind of approximation?

[pksunkara]

We have 256 color support, console-rs/console#72. Is it what you mean?

[sharkdp]

No. This is what the ansi_colours crate does for us:

ansi_colours is a library which converts between 24-bit sRGB colours and 8-bit colour palette used by ANSI terminals such as xterm on rxvt-unicode in 256-colour mode.

The most common use case is when using 24-bit colours in a terminal emulator which only support 8-bit colour palette. This package allows true-colours to be approximated by values supported by the terminal.

When mapping true-colour into available 256-colour palette (of which only 240 are actually usable), this package tries to balance accuracy and performance. It doesn’t implement the fastest algorithm nor is it the most accurate, instead it uses a formula which should be fast enough and accurate enough for most use-cases.

Or in code:

    // Approximate true-colour by colour in the palette:
    let rgb = (100, 200, 150);
    let index = ansi256_from_rgb(rgb);
    println!("{:?} ~ {:-3} {:?}", rgb, index, rgb_from_ansi256(index));

[pksunkara]

My bad then, I got confused with the name. ansi_colours probably can't be replaced.

[sharkdp]

And ansi_term is also a dependency of clap, so switching to console wouldn't really help.

[pksunkara]

Yeah. Want to note that clap moves to https://github.com/BurntSushi/termcolor in v3.

[sharkdp]

Thank you for the note. I guess there is a ticket somewhere documenting that decision and the reasons behind it? I'd be interested to read that.

[pksunkara]

clap-rs/clap#836

[pksunkara]

I also want to note that it needed quite a bit of architecture refactor in clap since the philosophy on how the output is constructed is a bit different compared to console or ansi_term.