User confusion over help messages not being colored, despite color being enabled

[epage]

Rust Version

1.55.0

Affected Version of clap

v3.0.0-beta.4

Expected Behavior Summary

When the color feature is enabled, all coloring is done

Actual Behavior Summary

Users have to know that the ColoredHelp setting exists and set it

Context

This came up when discussing clap's defaults. In addition being a very popular setting among clap CLIs, a user reported

I recently started using clap, and it took a bit to comprehend help messages were not coloured despite the color feature being the default. Lots of head scratching followed by "really?".

I understand the potential argument against having any colourisation by default (ie not a default feature), but regardless of the feature being default or not, colourisation should be the default when the feature is enabled.

Depending on what the motivation for this flag existing, we should either

• Remove it completely and always color help when color is on
• Change the default (and possibly rename to reflect that changed behavior)

[joshtriplett]

I completely agree: if you have the color feature enabled, you should get color automatically by default unless you disable it.

People can always disable ColoredHelp if they don't want it, or disable the color feature entirely to not get color anywhere.

[pksunkara]

@epage Do you have a design for this if we want to get this into v3?

[epage]

While I want to fix our defaults, I don't think this meets the minimum bar for the 3.0 milestone. Whatever the fix will be, will be small, so its easy to slip in, but I'm concerned about the decision making slowing us down and distracting us from other work.

[kbknapp]

This one seems much more simple to me to decide on than some of the other defaults questions. I essentially agree with @joshtriplett 100%. If our default features includes color, we color the terminal by default. However, we must maintain a way for users to turn that off both at runtime and by just not compiling the color feature.

[joshtriplett]

I agree; this one seems straightforward compared to other potential changes to defaults.

[epage]

If our default features includes color, we color the terminal by default. However, we must maintain a way for users to turn that off both at runtime and by just not compiling the color feature.

We still have the Always, Auto, Never settings.

If there is no real dispute on this (which is never really predictable, see bike shedding), I'll go ahead and remove it.