Option to force colours

[vebjornjr]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Colours are missing in Quill logs when running an application in QtCreator. QtCreator doesn't run the application in a terminal, but the output is shown in Application Output. I don't really know what kind of environment Application Output is, but it seems like Quill doesn't detect that it can show colour there. (Colours should be available in Application Output).

Describe the solution you'd like
An option to force colour usage to override the ConsoleColours::_set_can_use_colours() logic.

Additional context
A similar problem and solution with SpdLog: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/78707422/qtcreator-application-output-not-colored-with-logs-from-spdlog-c

[odygrd]

Hello, I am fine adding an option to force colours, but the solution is not that simple, please read below.

As a workaround for now I was able to get colours working in the existing quill version by selecting Run in terminal in the Qt Creator

[odygrd]

As you probably noticed above that was the Terminal QtCreator window and not the Application Output
I tried to force the colours but it is not currently working in the Application Output, the problem is this error

GetConsoleScreenBufferInfo failed. error: unknown error errno: 6

When we get this error we failback to writing a log without colours on Windows OS

https://github.com/odygrd/quill/blob/add-colourmode/include/quill/sinks/ConsoleSink.h#L458

[odygrd]

For windows it won’t work even if you force them

Colours are not working when running the application in QtCreator Application Output or VS debug window. This is because these environments don't provide a standard Windows console handle and Quill is using the console handle to set the colours for Windows

For Linux ANSI codes are used but I haven’t tested QtCreator on Linux

To handle outputting colours in non console environments on Windows we need to use ANSI codes which is currently only enabled for Linux

Are you using Windows or a different OS to run QtCreator ?

[odygrd]

In version 7.4.0 that will be released in a few days, you can now use the following code, which will work on platforms other than Windows:

  quill::Frontend::create_or_get_sink<quill::ConsoleSink>(
    "sink_id_1", quill::ConsoleColours::ColourMode::Always);

A further fix in version 8.0.0 (expected in a few months/weeks), will fix this on Windows as well.

[vebjornjr]

Nice work! Really quick too. Thank you.

I run QtCreator on Linux. I built quill from master and tested it in a little test project now. The force colour option works fine in Application Output.

[odygrd]

Thank you for confirming it works !