2 ms·

Fair distinction. There's a kind of unwritten understanding of what programs should and shouldn't do based on isatty, and I've never seen it explicitly document

Fair distinction. There's a kind of unwritten understanding of what programs should and shouldn't do based on isatty, and I've never seen it explicitly documented. Things many programs do if attached to a TTY: add color, add progress bars and similar uses of erase-and-redisplay, add/modify whitespace characters for readability, refuse to print raw binary, etc. Things some programs do, which can be problematic: prompt interactively when they're otherwise non-interactive. Things no program does or should do: change command-line processing, semantic behavior, or similar.

burntsushi 6y ago
> Things no program does or should do: change command-line processing, semantic behavior, or similar. Arguably ripgrep breaks this rule. :-) Compare `echo foo | rg foo` and `rg foo`. The former will search stdin. The latter will search the current working directory. In any case, I bring this up, because I've heard from folks that ripgrep changing its output format is "bad practice" and that it should "follow standard Unix conventions and not change the output format." And that's when I bring up `ls`. :-)
- sylvestre 6y ago
  This is one of the thing that I loved starting using rg :)