Feature request: Improve output console color scheme

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
java, spring-boot, typescript, vscode
Domain
developer-experience, tooling

Research direction

Start by tracing how the Java extension handles Spring Boot launch configurations and how arguments from launch.json are assembled; compare the application.properties and launch.json approaches described here. Define the settings.json on/off behavior, then verify that a Spring Boot project receives ANSI output by default and that the option can disable it.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

ai-triaged discussion enhancement feature-request spring ux

For Spring Boot projects, the debug output console should have a nice coloring theme by default, which is not the case currently.
With default settings, all text is a single color which is not very readable.
There is a related StackOverflow question regarding this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62280290/provide-color-theme-to-the-java-process-console-in-the-terminal-of-vscode-whil

Currently, there are two (easy, but not scalable) ways how to achieve the desired coloring:

  1. Add spring.output.ansi.enabled=ALWAYS to application.properties file -> The issue with this approach is that it has to be set up for each project and it just adds unnecessary complexity to application.properties.
  2. Add "args": "--spring.output.ansi.enabled=ALWAYS" in launch.json -> This issue with this approach is that it also needs to be set up per-project basis and it is not so easy to share configuration as .vscode directory is not within version control scope.

Proposed Solution
I suggest a solution that VS Code pass "args": "--spring.output.ansi.enabled=ALWAYS" by default for Spring Boot projects. There should be an option to control it (on/off) maybe within settings.json

Before
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After
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@nickzhums Please review.

Dominant language
TypeScript
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Forks
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Avg merge
17h 47m
Merged PRs (30d)
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