cli: improve colors used in CLI output to be friendly for dark/light background terminals

[wolverian]

Reproduction Steps

Run cdk init app --language=typescript in a Terminal with a light background color. I used VS Code Insiders with the i Light color theme.

Environment

• CLI Version : 1.18.0 (build bc924bc)
• Framework Version:
• OS : macOS Catalina 10.15.1 (19B88)
• Language :

Other

In general I recommend disabling color output unless the user explicitly requests it.

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This is 🐛 Bug Report

[shivlaks]

@wolverian - are you able to use the --no-color option successfully?

[shivlaks]

the option can also be set as a preference in ~/.cdk.json if that's a desired default

{
"no-color": true
}

[rix0rrr]

Even if --no-color works, I would still propose that we don't have logging.print() add color.

[wolverian]

I can report that --no-color removes color from the output, thank you.

[shivlaks]

@rix0rrr - I can see the benefit there as well... I was briefly looking at chalk and yargonaut as better alternatives. happy to repurpose this issue into a feature request.

did you have something different in mind?

[wolverian]

So, there are two features here that I would like:

• Make the output equally readable on all dark and light backgrounds, and
• Don't use colors by default, or support the NO_COLOR environment variable (ref. https://no-color.org).

[l0b0]

Why is this closed? There is a workaround, but the default is still colour (which is very useful) and the contrast is pretty bad on a dark background: