Re: Feature request: Enable possibility of colored stderr output

[A M]

Hello. Thanks everyone for explaining that Bash can't have effect on 
other processes stderr.

Chet, yes I certainly think it would be a good feature enabling more 
colorization in Bash's own output. About the other types of information 
you pointed out I think that's a good idea to consider them too.

Just to be clear: I am not giving any opinion on whether this feature 
should be enabled by default or not, just that the possibility exist for 
the user to choose to use or not.

As I briefly mentioned in my first email, using colorization to 
differentiate different types of messages could improve readability of 
the terminal and be helpful for the user.
I hope it seems fairly apparent to most people that if you have a body 
of text, if certain parts of the text, like errors and warnings, are in 
a different color than the "normal" text, that would result in the text 
being more readable as opposed to if all the text were just in a single 
color and no other methods were used to distinguish.

I have not researched the topic more in depth but I think it would be 
easy to do some searching online and finding various results, like 
studies on methods for improving the presentation of information.

Here is just something I found by a quick search:
https://blog.prototypr.io/effective-color-coding-bb83d698acb2?gi=dc87d4a4b1ae
"This research finds that color coding has an important effect on 
improving information acquisition and memory. People have a limited 
capacity for processing information and visual stimuli. Color helps us 
categorize the instructional stimuli we are presented with."

Best Regards
Alex

On 9/14/20 3:52 PM, Chet Ramey wrote:
> On 9/13/20 5:59 AM, A M wrote:
> > Hello, I would like to submit a feature request/suggestion on Bash. (I was
> > told submitting to this mailing list was the right way to do it.)
> >
> > Feature request: Enable possibility of colored stderr output.
> Let's separate the two cases: bash coloring its own output to stderr, which
> is usually warnings and errors, and output to stderr by processes bash runs.
>
> We can discard the latter case right away -- bash doesn't, and shouldn't,
> have any effect on another process's stderr other than redirecting it.
> That's something that should be left to the other process. If you really
> want it, you can do things outside of bash itself to achieve it.
>
> The first case is different: would there be any advantage to having bash
> color its own error messages? And how about other information that gets
> printed to stderr, like warnings or job status messages?