Color is non-functional (Win32)

[garfieldnate]

I have installed Win32::Console (and Term::ANSIColor just in case), but do not see color output. Googling around I got a more detailed SO question. I know that color output otherwise works because ack now has colored output, and it also uses Win32::Console to achieve this.
Using Windows 7, Strawberry 5.18.1.1, Test::Harness 3.29.

[Leont]

Color is not enabled by default on Windows, see here. Does it work if you explicitly enable it?

[garfieldnate]

Oh, that should be put in the documentation, too. But no, it's still just white on black when I use -c or --color, just like the guy in the SO question.

[garfieldnate]

I gave a shot at fixing this and completely failed, but maybe I can get the obvious ones out of the way.
I added the following lines in Tap/Formatter/Color.pm at the end of the *set_color sub:

$console->Attr($Win32::Console::FG_RED);
print "hello!\n";
$console->Flush; 

This printed hello!, but the console color was not changed to red (which it does in a separate standalone test).
If you remove line 46, which sets the background and foreground colors on the Win32::Console object, then it kills Perl during test running: Could not execute ("C:\...\perl.exe" t\my_test.t): open3: Can't close: Bad file descriptor at C:/.../perl/site/lib/TAP/Parser/Iterator/Process.pm line 153.

At this point I have absolutely no idea what to try. It's like the console is correctly being colored, but then we print to a different console or something. Wish I could help more :(

[garfieldnate]

A little more debugging: in the above code, if you replace print "hello!\n"; with $console->Write( "hello!\n" );, then nothing is printed out, but it should be.
If you move the my $console = Win32::Console->new( STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE() ); line inside of the *set_color block, then the color is set correctly! But now perl hangs, after warning with:

Use of uninitialized value $fd in pattern match (m//) at C:/.../perl/lib/IO/Handle.pm line 374.
Use of uninitialized value $fd in concatenation (.) or string at C:/.../per/lib/IO/Handle.pm line 379.

I traced the call stack back to IPC::Open3 line 410, which calls IO::Handle::fdopen, but $fd->{tmp_copy} and $fd->{mode} have become undefined, I guess because I called Win32::Console::new.

It seems to me that Win32::Console and IPC::Open3 do not play nicely, or at least they are not being made to play nicely.

[mjcarman]

The problem (as far as I can tell) is that it's applying color settings to the wrong handle (STDOUT instead of STDERR). With that trivial change I see colorized output. I've submitted a pull request.

That said, the output isn't quite what I expected. Test failures are red, but passed tests and diagnostics aren't colorized. The only time I see green is for an "all tests passed" summary.

Another option to fix the issue is to drop use of Win32::Console altogether. Term::ANSIColor works on Windows if you also load Win32::Console::ANSI. That would simplify the code in TAP::Formatter::Color. I don't know if there's a reason to prefer one module over the other.