Color Support Guide

loaders.zig includes a comprehensive terminal color system supporting basic, extended, and true colors.

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1. Defining Colors (loaders.Color)

The loaders.Color union lets you style your progress indicators with three tiers of terminal color support:

Tier 1: Standard 16-Color ANSI

Standard system terminal colors (supported by almost all shells):

• Basic: .black, .red, .green, .yellow, .blue, .magenta, .cyan, .white
• Bright: .bright_black, .bright_red, .bright_green, .bright_yellow, .bright_blue, .bright_magenta, .bright_cyan, .bright_white

const red_bar = loaders.BarStyle{
    .fill_fg = .red,
    .empty_fg = .bright_black,
};

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Tier 2: 256-Color Palette

Map custom 8-bit color indexes:

const custom_color = loaders.BarStyle{
    .fill_fg = .{ .color256 = 196 }, // Bold red-orange
};

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Tier 3: 24-Bit True Color (RGB)

Direct RGB configuration. Supported by modern shell emulators (iTerm2, Windows Terminal, Alacritty, kitty):

const premium_gradient = loaders.BarStyle{
    .fill_fg = .{ .rgb = .{ .r = 0, .g = 255, .b = 128 } }, // Spring green
};

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2. Text Attributes (loaders.Attribute)

Apply basic text modifications via the .attrs array slice:

• .bold: Emphasized bold text.
• .dim: Low intensity.
• .italic: Slanted text.
• .underline: Underlined.
• .blink: Flashing.
• .reverse: Inverse colors.

const bold_bar = loaders.BarStyle{
    .fill_fg = .yellow,
    .attrs = &.{.bold, .underline},
};

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3. Automatic Color Suppression

To prevent garbling terminal outputs, loaders.zig automatically checks standard environments and disables all ANSI escape sequences if:

• Output is redirected (e.g. cmd > log.txt).
• NO_COLOR is present in the environment block.
• Terminal identifies as dumb (TERM=dumb).
• Operating inside standard CI environment pipelines with no terminal color parameters.