Style customization

[medikoo]

It'll be nice to be able to style the output, e.g. at serverless we'd love to resemble style to which we already accustomed our users, as e.g.:

Currently, it appears that without hacking of inquirer internals it's not possible to achieve.

[SBoudrias]

I'm open to extend the API to support something like this. Maybe you could suggest how the API could look like?

[medikoo]

Maybe you could suggest how the API could look like?

As inquirer is singleton, it could work as:

inquirer.registerStyle({
  // Assign on top of default style (not changed remain as default)
  question: chalk.bold.yellow,
  answer: chalk.bold,
   ..
})
// All further prompts rely on that

Internally, probably @inquirer/style should be introduced to serve as a style information source for all prompts.

What do you think?

[SBoudrias]

Yeah I think I like that. Then we'd need to update our prompts to use styles.question(prefix + question) instead of raw chalk.

I don't think an extra module is necessary? What would this module do? Encapsulate default styles and the way to extend it?

Might be good to also unify everything like:

{
	colors: {
		question: chalk.bold.yellow,
		...
	},
	glyphs: {
		questionPrefix: { default: '? ', windows: '? ' },
	}
}

There's been request to update the way we modify glyphs quite often too, so this might be a good occasion to unify everything under a styling interface.

[medikoo]

Yeah I think I like that. Then we'd need to update our prompts to use styles.question(prefix + question)

It might be more composable if a prefix (which may already have a custom styles applied by user) is kept out of enforced styling, e.g. in my case I want prefix to be in different style than question body, so if question style would be applied to it, I would need to add hack so it doesn't really apply.

I don't think an extra module is necessary? What would this module do? Encapsulate default styles and the way to extend it?

I thought it'll be good if given prompts can just access given styles setup (without a need of injecting them as argument for every prompt creation). So my first thought was that e.g. here it can be:

const style = require('@inquirer/style');

but technically we could also do:

const { style } = require('@inquirer/core')

There's been request to update the way we modify glyphs quite often too, so this might be a good occasion to unify everything under a styling interface.

Currently, if I see correctly ? is a default value for a prefix, which is already fully customizable.
I'm not sure if it really applies for that. Are there any other characters in other places you're referring to?

[SBoudrias]

All the requests were about the question prefix specifically. But we could extend to things like lists characters, etc.

[SBoudrias]

Closing this old issue, there's a theme today configuration supported by all prompts.