google/comprehensive-rust

Colored output in the playground console?

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#407 opened on Feb 14, 2023

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 (1 comment) (0 reactions) (0 assignees)Rust (32,954 stars) (2,009 forks)batch import
good first issuehelp wanted

Description

One selling point of the Rust compiler is colorful error messages that point directly to the problem. However, the embedded playground doesn't illustrate that, because everything becomes monochrome.

While running the course, I occasionally switched to presenting my terminal to illustrate that, but this required some back-and-forth to present a different window, copy-paste the code, run Cargo, etc. This slowed down the course, so I rarely did that.

In principle, there could be a way to take cargo/rustc's colored output, and turn it into suitable HTML/CSS to display the colors in the embedded "console" as well.

Contributor guide

Tech stack
rusthtmlcss
Domain
frontenddeveloper experience
Issue type
feature
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
3
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
1-2 days
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
stale
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
mostly clear
Prerequisites
basic Rust knowledgeHTML/CSS understandingfamiliarity with the playground component
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
60
Research direction
Investigate how the playground console currently renders output. Look at the existing code that invokes cargo/rustc and captures stdout/stderr. Find how terminal escape sequences are handled in HTML/CSS. Consider using a library like ansi to html to convert colored output. Test with various error messages to ensure colors are displayed correctly.