Colors from Hspec tests results are not displayed in ghciwatch output

[jaredramirez]

What happened?

When running a test suite (hspec) with ghciwatch with the following command:

ghciwatch
    --command "cabal repl my-app-test --repl-options=-fdiagnostics-color=always"
    --watch app --watch src --watch test
    --test-ghci "Spec.main"
    --clear

Colors to not appear in the test output.

In addition to passing in -fdiagnostics-color=always thru a cli option, I have added it to ghc-options in my-app.cabal and project.cabal:

-- my-app.cabal
test-suite my-app-test
     ...
     ghc-options: -Wwarn -fdiagnostics-color=always

-- project.cabal
packages: christmas-gift-drawing.cabal
multi-repl: True
package *
  ghc-options: -fdiagnostics-color=always

What did you expect to happen?

I expected the colored output from the test to be visible in ghciwatch. Here's a screenshot of the output:

Here's what I would expect the it to look like (via ghcid):

Steps to reproduce the issue

I think there's enough info above!

The version of ghciwatch with the bug

ghciwatch 1.0.1

[9999years]

Hmmm, you might need to tweak something in your test suite runner (ghciwatch captures output so it might be seeing that stderr is not a tty or whatever), or this might be a more fixable bug with ANSI escape handling...

[chreekat]

I was going to open an issue myself for another problem with colors -- maybe related?

If I run https://github.com/chreekat/cubectl , the main function prints a bunch of lo-tech tests. One of them is pretty-printing that involves a bunch of color.

In the screenshot below, there are two tmux panes.

• In the upper one is the output of running main from cabal repl.
• The lower pane has the output of ghciwatch --command "cabal repl ." --watch . --error-file errors.err --clear --test-ghci main

Since the color blocks are just a space character with colored background, nothing shows up at all in ghciwatch.

[9999years]

Thanks, that's a helpful test case!

[jaredramirez]

Realized after revisiting I could pass --color to hspec with:

--after-startup-ghci ":set args --color"

And this results in colored output!

However, when that arg is passed, file reload stops working like as mentioned in this issue: #189

Closing this for now.

[chreekat]

I'd like to reopen the issue since that sounds like a workaround hack, and my own test case isn't solvable that way. :)