FAQ¶
Q: Why do I get different results on different platforms?
Different platforms and terminals have support for different numbers of colors, attributes and colortables, and colorise tries its best to provide uniform results although platform differences makes this hard to do 100% correct.
For example, depending on your console/terminal color support, you may have anything from 8-, 16-, 88-, 256-color support or even full-blown 24-bit colors available. If you request a 24-bit color but only have 256 colors, colorise will try its best to approximate the requested color according to the available colortable for 256 colors.
Q: I have custom colors set up in Windows, why are they not reflected in colorise?
On Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008, colorise will read the current colortable and use that to lookup and approximate colors so your custom console colors should be reflected. If you are working on a Windows version before that, your custom colors will not be properly reflected as colorise will have to assume a default colortable.
Q: How come I can use more than 16 colors in Windows?
Some versions of Windows 10 have 24-bit color support and can interpret ANSI escape codes, the latter which is commonly how colors are emitted on Mac and Linux systems.
Q: Why are the named colors on Windows incorrect?
On Windows, named colors are actually indices into a color table and not actual colors. Typing
>>> colorise.cprint('This should be yellow', fg='yellow')
will give you the color in the table correspoding to the ‘yellow’ index, not
necessarily the color yellow. This might be the case if you defined your own
colors. You can see the current colors by right-clicking the top bar of the
console and selecting ‘Properties’ then selecting the ‘Colors’ tab. You can
also set these programatically using colorise.redefine_colors().
The same is true for other terminals on other platforms. For example, iTerm.app allows you to redefine the basic system colors.
Q: The blink and italic attributes do not appear to work in iTerm.app?
This has to be enabled manually in the settings in iTerm.app. Go into Preferences → Profiles → Text and check the boxes for “Blinking text” and “Italic text”.
Q: Can I use colorise in different threads?
colorise is not thread-safe.
On nix systems, colorise emits ANSI escape codes to print colored output. Internally, this happens in a way where multiple threads could potentially interfere causing colors sequences to be intermingled, although it should be possible to manually achieve this in a thread-safe manner.
On Windows systems that do not support ANSI escape codes, multiple threads would also interfere with each other. On Windows systems that do support ANSI escape codes, it should still be possible to output colored text in a thread-safe manner.
Q: Why do the tests fail with ‘The handle is invalid.’ on Windows? Q: Why does colorise not do colored output on Windows?
Redirecting output or running colorise in a subprocess call means that the Windows Console API will return a ‘The handle is invalid.’ error (errno 6) since the output is no longer a valid console.
tox and pytest capture stdout and stderr which causes the above mentioned error.
Q: Was the colorise logo generated using colorise?
Yes :)
