Adding color to the nextpnr (critical path) output?

[TheZoq2]

Seeing there is some interest colors in the nextpnr output https://mastodon.social/@lofty@chaos.social/109402807095687030 reminded me of an experiment I did a while back of highlighting the critical path reports:

In that screenshot it's done as an external regex but I would be interested in making the change properly inside nextpnr if there is interest from your side

Before writing the code however, I wanted to check what the options for implementing it is. I found https://github.com/YosysHQ/nextpnr/blob/master/common/kernel/timing.cc#L717 and associated functions which seems to be the place to make the change, but the question i'm having is how to do the color printing in a good way.

Doing it manually by printing ANSI escape codes (and whatever windows wants) would be doable, but kind of feels like something where I'd reach for a library, especially when you want to do things like turning off the colors if being piped somewhere. Would it be OK to add something like https://github.com/ikalnytskyi/termcolor into 3rdparty to do this?

I hope my tired rambling makes sense, to summarize, 1: would it be desirable to have colored critical path info? 2: What's the best way to do it? Manually, with a library, or something else?