NO_COLOR

An increasing number of command-line software programs output text with ANSI color escape codes by default. While some developers and users obviously prefer seeing these colors, many users don’t. Unfortunately, every new piece of software seems to have a different way of disabling colored text output and some software has no way at all.

Accepting the futility of trying to reverse this trend, an informal standard is hereby proposed:

All command-line software which outputs text with ANSI color added should check for the presence of a NO_COLOR environment variable that, when present (regardless of its value), prevents the addition of ANSI color.

By adopting this standard, users that prefer to have plain, non-colored text output can set one environment variable in their shell to have it automatically affect all supported software.

This website will document which software has adopted this standard and when support was added. For software that has not or will not adopt this standard, an attempt will be made to document how to otherwise disable color.

To add software to this site, clone this site’s Git repository and submit a pull request.

Color libraries supporting NO_COLOR to disable default color output

Software using these libraries to output color inherently support disabling color via NO_COLOR .

Software Description Version/Date Supported cli-color NPM package for colors and formatting 2.0.0 ColorDebug Colorful command line output C/C++ macros 2019-02-09 colored Rust crate for coloring terminal output 1.7.0 crayon R package for colored terminal output 2018-02-08 Dye Cross-platform terminal styling for Swift command-line interface 0.0.1 kleur A Node.js library for formatting terminal text with ANSI colors 4.1.0 LogColor Python library for coloring output in log messages 2018-01-24 paint Ruby gem for terminal colors and effects 2.2.0 Pastel Tiny .NET Core library for coloring console output 1.2.0 Term::ANSIColor Perl library for color output using ANSI escape sequences 5.01 termcolor Rust crate for cross platform terminal colors 1.1.0 TextOutput Go package for controlling text output, using VT100 terminal codes 1.9.1

Software directly supporting NO_COLOR to disable default color output

Software Description Version/Date Supported alogview Android logcat Filter 2018-10-31 Ammonite Scala Scripting 1.0.0 beets Music library manager and MusicBrainz tagger 1.4.9 bfs Breadth-first version of the UNIX find command 1.4.1 Bikeshed Spec/Document Processor 2018-07-27 Bloop Compilation/test server for Scala and Java 2018-07-02 CakePHP Full stack framework for PHP 4.1.0 cdist Usable configuration management 6.6.0 Cras Cras: The Anti-Procrastination Tool 0.1.0 csv2db CSV database loading tool 1.4.0 DataLad Data management and publication multitool 0.11.5 deno Secure TypeScript runtime 0.2.11 elfinfo Utility for displaying ELF information 1.0.1 Elixir Dynamic, functional language 1.10.0 fd Simple, fast, and user-friendly alternative to find 7.5.0 ffind Rust utility to find files and folders 2018-03-24 forest-arborist Manage a loosely coupled forest of git or hg repositories 1.2.0 fselect Utility for finding files with SQL-like expressions 0.6.1 gatsby-cli GatsbyJS command line interface 2019-08-05 git-subline-merge Git merge driver for resolving conflicts 2019-07-27 gopass Password store for teams 1.8.0 Homebrew Package manager for macOS 1.5.5 KBSecret Secret manager backed by Keybase and KBFS 1.4.0 kitten Tiny multi-server automation tool 0.2.14 konch Python shell/REPL configuration tool 4.0.0 lc Multi-dimensional, abbreviating ls/file lister in Nim 2019-11-18 lr File list generator 2018-01-29 mblaze Unix utilities to deal with Maildir 2018-01-29 meli Terminal mail client in Rust 2019-01-27 Middleman Ruby-based static site generator 2019-02-18 Modules Dynamic modification of one’s environment 4.5.0 mu Maildir indexer/searcher 2019-02-02 Nette Tester Testing library for PHP 2.3.3 NGLess Domain specific language for bioinformatics 2018-10-29 nnn File manager 2020-04-05 npm Package manager for JavaScript 5.8.0 nvh Node Version Helper 4.1.0 o Small, fast, and limited text editor 2.13.2 picocli Tiny Java command line interface 3.9.0 Planck Stand-alone ClojureScript REPL 2.23.0 procs Process and system query and formatting 2019-11-18 pulumi Programming-language-based IaC framework 0.14.3 PyDERASN Python ASN.1 DER library 2018-02-14 rsmodules Manage one’s environment by the use of modulefiles 2018-10-09 smenu Terminal selection filter 2018-02-05 Snow Testing library for C 2018-01-24 Symfony PHP framework and reusable components 4.4.0 taoup Fortune implementation 2018-09-10 txtnish Twtxt microblogging client 2018-08-31 twa Tiny web auditor with strong opinions 1.1.0 undertime Timezone coordination tool 2018-06-06 whence Print URL a file was downloaded from 0.9.2

Disabling color in software not supporting NO_COLOR

Frequently Asked Questions