Debian spices up APT package manager with a dash of color
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Debian spices up APT package manager with a dash of color
https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/18/apt_3_debian/
2.9 gives a taste of what's to come
Kinda miffed they didn't include a screenshot of the colors, but I'm guessing the readability will be vastly better!
Here are some from another article. It looks really nice.
Previous
New
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2024/04/apt-3-0-colours-columns-new-ui
I hate it, makes me look much less like a hacker while installing pre-built software from other people
that is vastly more readable, not only thanks to the colors, but the indentation, new lines, and straightforward section titles are a huge improvement.
I love this change, actually, I'm not a boring-text purist. Proper categorizing of data allows me to spot things at a glance much easier, and I'm all in favor of anything that can improve efficiency and understanding, especially for new folks, so we can improve product adoption.
I love it, but as someone with a red-green colour blind coworker, I always try to use blue for positive feedback, and orange for negative, as its better for representation for most colourblind types.
I wish FreeDesktop would standardize CLIs taking their application colours from the user theme so that colourblindness is catered for.
I'm using sid and i'm loving thia change. It's an obvious visual cue to check if i'm about to remove something important like my whole desktop environment lol
I didn't know I needed multi-coloured terminal text until I saw the 2nd image. It looks so much more readable!
Install and run "btop".
You could scroll down to the screenshots on the GitHub page, but I had a friend recommend btop to me and seeing it for the first time running on my own machine was an experience. Highly recommend.
Nala is a much nicer frontend for apt, which includes additional features like parallel downloads
I have heard of Nala before but have never actually taken the time to install it. Based on your comment, I just checked it out on one of the Debian 12 systems I run. Turns out it was right in the repos.
Wow. So good. I cannot believe it took me this long. Jealous of it on the Arch installs now.
I installed it on Ubuntu 22.04 as well but it was not there when I searched. I had to add the jammy-backports repo first.
Thank you for the push.
If you're anything like me and find coloured text is often unreadable in a terminal window, here's the list of how to address the issue:
Agreed. I haven't read the article yet, but my first thought was "how am I going to turn that off"
Probably it will have an option --no-color or something as well as config. Somebody will ask for it for a specific niche use case and it might not be hard to implement within apt so they add it
And this is what Debian users will be doing more often : Installing, uninstalling and installing software just because APT and nala is so pretty and colorful. It adds a whole new flavor to the art of Procrastination 😁
Nala is too cool but kinda messy if you resize terminal. It puts things in box hsing unicode characters and nake it look like some gui. Also nala is using python-apt and it also require apt. This brings out of the box ecperience with apt itself
Edit: typos
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Major updates to Debian's Advanced Packaging Tool don't come along very often, but APT 2.9 is here with a significant facelift.
It's only just over a year since we reported on APT 2.6, development of which was spurred by the inclusion of soft-loadable firmware in the default installation media for Debian 12.
It also lists the important section of packages to be removed last so they don't scroll off the top of the screen during large operations.
The Reg FOSS desk suspects that the changes are in part aimed at catching up with two other packaging tools.
The DNF packaging tool used in Fedora, Red Hat and the RHELatives has attractively formatted output like this … but closer to home, Nala, an alternative command-line package-management tool for Debian and Ubuntu, brings some of the DNF look and feel to .deb-based distros.
We have recommended Nala previously and Teejeetech's Snap and Flatpak-free Ubuntu remix Zinc – now renamed Asmi – includes it as standard.
The original article contains 377 words, the summary contains 163 words. Saved 57%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
i tought debian didnt have colored terminals by default? at least my server installs don't.
"Color terminal" isn't a thing. Applications can choose to output ANSI escape codes which most terminal emulators will render as color changes. Whether and which colors get used depends on the value of $TERM, which informs the application of the capabilities of the terminal emulator.
So if your remote servers don't have color, either $TERM isn't being set or its value is unknown to the server. Most modern terminal emulators support at least the same escape codes as xterm-256color though so you can always try to export that.