When is it appropriate to use colour in a command-line application?
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marcoms
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Published on 2013-11-01T18:39:55Z
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2013/11/01
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Currently I have a command-line application in C called btcwatch
. It has a -C
option that it can receive as an argument that compares the current price of Bitcoin with a price that was stored beforehand with -S
. Example output with this option is:
$ btcwatch -vC # -v = verbose
buy: UP $ 32.000000 USD (100.000000 -> 132.000000)
sell: UP $ 16.000000 USD (100.000000 -> 116.000000)
The dilemma is whether to use colour for the UP
or DOWN
string (green and red, respectively). Most command-line applications I know of (apart from git) stay away from colour in their output. In my desire for btcwatch
to look and be quite "standard" (use of getopt
, Makefiles, etc), I'm not sure if colour would look out of place in this situation.
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