Have you considered that many of us want ansi codes in the pipeline? For example, all the log viewers I use understand things like color codes. If I don't want ANSI codes in the output, then I can just pipe it through sed 's/\x1b\[[;[:digit:]]*m//g' which is easy. However if a program tries to be "smart" like you're describing w.r.t. hiding ANSI codes, then I have to go to all this trouble wrapping it inside another program which is a fake pseudo-terminal, which captures and extracts the real output.
> Have you considered that many of us want ansi codes in the pipeline?
Yes I have. Using /dev/tty doesn't stop an application's author from adding a --color that lets their program send color codes to stdout. But if the author doesn't use /dev/tty either stdout or stderr of their application can't be redirected.
Yes but no one agrees on what that should be. For example, I need to flip through a 623 page manual to discover -fdiagnostic-color=always is the magic incantation for gcc. I have to repeat that for every app I use. Some do it using environment variables, except no one agrees on names there either, so I have to bloat my environment and it slows down process creation. Whereas with my sed solution, anyone who knows regex can could write it in a few minutes, and it only has to be figured out one time. Furthermore, there will eventually come a day when the tools we pipe stuff into all get good enough to gracefully consume ANSI codes, and there's no longer a need for sed. But we can't evolve in that direction if we use the solution you're proposing, which binds us to a colorless past. Erring on the side of having more information is always a good thing. The burden of the flag should be on disabling, not enabling, and there shouldn't even need to be a flag since there's sed.
Search color, its the first result as an abbreviated reference and the second as a full explanation. Its also the first result on google/ddg/etc.
You have a good argument, but claiming you have to "flip through a 623 page manual" and "with my sed solution, anyone who knows regex could write it in a few minutes" detracts from your point.
