Re: global fdisk colors disable

["Pádraig Brady" <P@draigBrady.com>]

On 01/15/2014 08:27 AM, Karel Zak wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 01:47:40AM -0500, Felix Miata wrote:
>> Is there a way to do $SUBJECT? One really shouldn't have to resort to using
>> -L on every invocation to be able to see fdisk output. 
> 
>  Does it mean that fdisk output is broken or you just don't like
>  colors? You can use:
> 
>    alias fdisk=fdisk -L=never
> 
>  in your shell profile or rc file.
> 
>> I see nothing in the
>> man page about any kind of config file. I don't think there's ever been a
>> reason to configure it before.
> 
>  Well, I guess that more people prefer colorized output so this
>  feature is enabled by default.
> 
> 
>  I have already thought about it and it would be probably nice to have
>  a way how to globally configure colors for all command line utils
>  (e.g.  util-linux, coreutils, ...).
>  
>  It seems we have no standard and package  independent solution now,
>  so distributions use things like "alias" in shell profile files (for
>  example for ls(1), grep(1), ...). It would be nice to have at least
>  global variable (something like COLOR_MODE={auto,never,always}) to
>  avoid aliases with --color= option. (CC: Padraig ;-)

I think the current mechanism used is best.
I.E. default to showing colors when possible but give an option to disable.
Global env vars come with their own disadvantages.

However I will say that one has to be careful when using colors,
and the use in fdisk seems a bit redundant. I.E. colors are useful
to distinguish things, like the portion of a match in grep or
the type of a file in ls. I'm not sure the items distinguished
in fdisk non obvious and worth the hassle of worrying about color.

thanks,
Pádraig.