ui: Usability improvements #110
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The original need for stripping ansi escape sequences was so we could apply our own styling when the terminal is attended and we're doing custom terminal drawing. However, when the output is unattended, we do not have a need for stripping ansi escape sequences. Lots of CIs force coloring even though output is not attended. This is so the logs are easier to read. vmtest should respect that and not strip ansi escape sequences when output is unattended.
danobi
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I think the command within the guest is going to run as The confusing part too is that here we essentially want to "disable styling by stripping it" when attended (because we do our own) but leave it untouched when not attended, which is counter intuitive as usually, a command should not do any styling if unattended (so it is easier to grep ...). |
| const HELP_ENV_VARS: &str = r#"Environment variables: | ||
| VMTEST_NO_UI Set to disable UI [default: unset] | ||
| "#; | ||
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| #[derive(Parser, Debug)] | ||
| #[clap(version)] | ||
| #[clap(version, disable_colored_help=true, after_help=HELP_ENV_VARS)] |
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clap supports both parameter and env variable by setting env in the argument derive. https://stackoverflow.com/a/73531388
This means that the value of args.dry_run could be set either from the CLI with --dry-run or from the environment with DRY_RUN=1, not exactly what you are trying to do, but mentioning htis in case.
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I was trying to avoid needing to thread the variable through a bunch of the code (which would require a larger refactor). Seemed ok enough to just bypass with env var :P
Actually... the opposite, it is always running in unattended mode because the command runs through the qemu guest agent, not the shell we spin during init. |
This disable the terminal drawing UI in vmtest. Previous workaround was `vmtest ... | cat -`. But that's only obvious to people who are deeply familiar with linux/unix. So add a more mundane environment variable and document it.
String clipping is only useful if we're rendering the UI. If output is unattended or user has requested UI disabled, no need to clip output.
Right, so by default the output from the guest is unstyled. And the UI will do a pre-emptive strip so window styling can reliably be applied. That's in case guest styling was forced by the user. But in the case the UI is disabled, we should leave any forced styling in. B/c there's no need to strip in that case - user is explicitly requesting it and we're not drawing the window. |
Some usability improvements. See individual commits for more details.