How do I stop npm's colored output from looking ugly in Emacs term-mode?

Question

When using npm in M-x term, it generate color message like this (even with -q) :

inverse color

Information from what-cursor-position

There are text properties here:
font-lock-face       (:foreground "red3" :background "black" :inverse-video nil)
fontified            t

It is ugly, and also hard to read in other themes, is it possible to change the color on the fly ? For example, change color of text that match npm http, npm ERR!

Thanks.

I didn't know that! Looks like it is more practical than make emacs change term color :) — Rangi Lin, Dec 20 '13 at 15:42
Yeah, I figured the same -- there are lots of Emacs libraries whose Lisp code is accessible to the relative newcomer and straightforward to customize, but `term-mode` is not one of those libraries. — Aaron Miller, Dec 20 '13 at 15:45
So that this question doesn't hang around unanswered, I've promoted my earlier comment to an answer, and also edited the title to better reflect the sense of the question itself. — Aaron Miller, Dec 20 '13 at 19:26

score 35 · Accepted Answer · edited Nov 02 '16 at 14:04

35

You can disable colors in npm with the command:

npm config set color false

This doesn't exactly answer your question, in that it's not a way to override ANSI colors in term-mode, but it will solve your problem, in that the npm output will no longer be ugly and hard to read.

edited Nov 02 '16 at 14:04

mikemaccana

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answered Dec 20 '13 at 19:25

Aaron Miller

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You can also run your command as `npm --no-color `, which is what I do in my scripts. – Guss May 15 '14 at 06:46
1

this answer is not working for me. npm version 6.9.0 – sureshvv May 26 '19 at 07:06
@sureshvv Works here for npm 7.4.0 (Debian buster-backports) – ceving Jul 22 '21 at 07:57
Neither config nor `--no-color` worked for me on Windows. – Slion Mar 22 '23 at 13:07

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 26 '14 at 06:52

I created a wrapper for npm in davidchambers/dotfiles#1. Here's the code in full:

__strip_background_colors() {
  local output="$(sed $'s:\x1B\[4[0-9]m::g')"
  [[ -n $output ]] && printf %s%s "$output" "$1"
}

npm() {
  # Strip the visually offensive background colours from npm's output,
  # leaving the foreground colours intact.
  NPM_CONFIG_COLOR=always "$(which npm)" "$@" \
    1> >(__strip_background_colors $'\n' >&1) \
    2> >(__strip_background_colors '' >&2)
}

It removes the offensive background colours while preserving the rather nice foreground colours. :)

How do I stop npm's colored output from looking ugly in Emacs term-mode?

2 Answers2