colors.js VS chalk

However, it's unlikely that the majority of users actually visit GitHub at https://github.com/Marak/colors.js to review the code, even at a high level. Most developers tend to rely on the assurance that open source software is generally safe to use.

> A new feature was added to the colors.js project for generating cool ASCII Art American Flags. Unfortunately, this feature was not bug-free and some test code slipped into the release causing issues downstream. Nobody is perfect. Everyone makes mistakes from time to time.

https://github.com/Marak/colors.js/commits/master shows 4 commits and 2 releases. Does not seem like a simple mistake

> As per our internal open-source development process, I opened an Issue in colors to track the bug as soon as it was confirmed. It happened to be a weekend [...] I tagged some other open-source developers I've worked with in the past to see if they had time to assist and closed the browser tab.

Early this month, the malicious attack on free-to-use libraries, namely color.js and faker.js, created a real uproar in the development community. These tools are used in thousands of projects and their downloading rate from npm is estimated in millions per week. To everyone’s surprise, it turned out to be an inside job. Marak Squires, the creator of these libraries, intentionally committed malicious code to his projects and published updated codebases on GitHub and npm. It is said that this sabotage was caused by unsuccessful attempts of Mr. Squires to monetize his projects. Fortunately, malicious packages were quickly removed and the attacker’s account was suspended. The story sparked a new wave of discussion in the development community on possible steps to make the development and maintenance of open-source projects more sustainable.

See: https://github.com/Marak/colors.js/issues/285

Ever used colors.js? How about the same in dart?

4. Chalk

Chalk: Provides an easy way to stylize terminal strings with various colors and text formatting in Node.js, aiding in creating visually appealing command-line outputs

Chalk is a popular choice for adding colors to CLI output while maintaining readability.

Librerías: Chalk winston, log4js

Today the most popular library and de facto standard is the chаlk. The chalk has rich functionality, is fast but not ideal. It lacks some useful features.

This is a new tutorial on how to create a command line interface application, and our application today is a Mortgage Calculator. I used in this program packages such as 1- inquirer for interactive questions and answers: https://www.npmjs.com/package/inquirer 2- Sqlite3 DBMS 3- Chalk for colorful output in the terminal: https://www.npmjs.com/package/chalk

One of the libraries I used most that went full-ESM is Chalk. They released v5 over a year-and-a-half ago (November 2021) with ESM-only support and haven't updated v4 - their last iteration that supported CommonJS - since. If you go into their GitHub Issues section, you'll see a number of issues raised about CommonJS support, most of which are just responded to with a link to a post they made about switching over. Fair enough. I guess if I had to constantly answer the same question over and over, I might do the same.

To colorize my logs, I used a chalk package and created a logger utility:

We will add some dependencies to help us deal with CLI behaviours (inquirer) and text coloring (chalk).