change default targets console output color?

[gorkang]

Hi there!

TLDR: The targets output default color is red, which makes custom errors/warnings hard to see. Changing to blue could be a nice compromise? Alternatively, something like options(targets.default_text_color = "white") could work? Examples below.

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When targets is running in interactive mode, all the console output is in red. This makes warnings or errors in our custom functions really hard to find.

For example:

Compare the above with a white text color for the targets outputs. This makes warnings/errors much easier to find:

I guess is the issue with using white comes when the console background is also white:

So, what about blue? Seems good enough with white/black backgrounds:

And decent enough with bluish backgrounds:

To do this, I added cli::col_blue() to the msg var in the following functions in utils_cli.R:

cli_blue_bullet <- function(msg) {
  symbol <- cli::col_blue(cli::symbol$bullet)
  msg <- cli::col_blue(paste(symbol, msg))
  message(msg)
}

cli_green_bullet <- function(msg) {
  symbol <- cli::col_green(cli::symbol$bullet)
  msg <- cli::col_blue(paste(symbol, msg))
  message(msg)
}

cli_green_check <- function(msg) {
  symbol <- cli::col_green(cli::symbol$tick)
  msg <- cli::col_blue(paste(symbol, msg))
  message(msg)
}

Alternatively, maybe a global option such as options(targets.default_text_color = "white") could be nice?

Cheers,

[wlandau]

This is an instance of r-lib/cli#467, so unfortunately user-generated messages will still be red. But for messages generated by targets, I think it makes sense to use red (cli::col_red()) for errors and warnings and the default theme color (cli::col_none()) everywhere else. Implemented in 3ff0ba6. Still doesn't seem to fix what's going on in terminals outside RStudio though.

[adhi-r]

so I'm having the opposite issue - everything is white so it's hard to find the error. how can i fix this?

[wlandau]

Not all platforms support colors, e.g. if you are using a very simple terminal interface. You might have a look at https://cli.r-lib.org/reference/cli-config.html to see if there is an option or environment variable you can toggle in _targets.R to enable colors.