Colored output detection issue in VS Code on Windows 8.1

[Thibaud Colas]

Apologies if this is a known issue. I searched for references to 'Windows' in the bug tracker and didn't find any that matched. I'm also unsure whether Windows 8.1 support is important to Django or not.

Trying Django 3.2 on a Windows machine in VS Code, I noticed the colored CLI output (​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.2/ref/django-admin/#syntax-coloring) doesn't work in the VS Code integrated terminal. This is with Git Bash, and the built-in cmd.exe as far as I can see.

Here is the type of output I'm seeing (Git Bash in this case):

$ python manage.py makemigrations
←[36;1mMigrations for 'blog':←[0m
  ←[1mblog\migrations\0001_initial.py←[0m
    - Create model BlogIndexPage
(.venv)

See the attached screenshot, which shows that colors support works otherwise:

For what it's worth I also tried Git Bash and the cmd.exe prompt outside VS Code, and both seemed to work as expected (not showing any colored output).

I also tried installing colorama, and with this installed I get the expected colored output in the VS Code terminal. So the issue seems to be with the detection of whether color codes should be in the output or not.

[Carlton Gibson]

Hi Thibaud — thanks for the report here.

...Windows 8.1 support...

I also tried installing colorama, and with this installed I get the expected colored output in the VS Code terminal.

So, I'm going to say wontfix here. I don't see that we can (or should) spend time working around this when ​Windows 8.1 is essentially end of life — last release 7 years ago — and ​has such small usage.

That colorama solves the issue seems sufficient to me.

Happy if you want to review the ​Syntax colouring docs for a tweak.

I hope that seems reasonable.

[GitHub <noreply@…>]

In 4f128fcf:

Refs #32694 -- Clarified when colorama requirement is needed in Windows how-to.

[Carlton Gibson <carlton.gibson@…>]

In d716d30a:

[3.2.x] Refs #32694 -- Clarified when colorama requirement is needed in Windows how-to.

Backport of 4f128fcf5dd5099a5ea374a87cad64852a9b62dd from main

[Thibaud Colas]

Thank you Carlton, great to confirm this is a Windows 8.1-only issue. Now I just need to work on getting my relatives to update…

Thank you for tweaking the docs as well. It’s nice that there are clear options to either disable color codes, or have them work with the extra package.