meteor/meteor — pull request #3232 by ekatek (2014-12-05 02:22:45+00:00)
Title: Automatically line-wrap output

Includes the following changes to Console.js:

- Console.info, Console.warn, Console.debug and Console.error now automatically
line-wrap the output to 80 characters, or the width of the terminal screen (if
known). This is in line with our current style guide on how things should be wrapped!

- Sometimes, there are parts of text that we don't want to line-wrap. For example, if we are
telling the user to run 'meteor long-command --with --options' we don't want to
have a newline in the middle of that! Wrap those commands in Console.command, like
this:
Console.info("something and then run", Console.command(command), "and then");
This also makes them bold if chalk is on, as a nice bonus. So, if we ever turn
chalk back on, the bolding of commands will be more consistent.

- Sometimes, there is bulkier output that we don't want to format at all, including
line-wrapping: log snippets, stack traces, JSON output, etc. In that case, we can use
Console.rawInfo, Console.rawError, Console.rawWarn and Console.rawDebug. Don't use
Console.command inside the raw* functions! It won't be processed (at all).

- There are fancier things that we can do, other than just simply wrapping things.
We can indent:
" Start here and then when wrapping
continue over here".

We frequently do this for commands, for example. In the past, we did this manually --
but we can't do this for long messages that might get wrapped, and anyway, it is
good to codify this instead of counting spaces. Allows us to be better about consistency,
for example.

- We can also add a bulletPoint, which is a small notice in the beginning that looks like
this:
" => Start here and then when wrapping
continue below the bulletPoint".

Since it is a elss intuitive option, I have wrapped most of the time that we use a
bulletPoint into helper functions on the Console.js.

- Some common bulletpoints that we use are:
ASCII Checkboxes (Console.success)
ASCII X-s (Console.failWarn and Console.failInfo)
=> (Console.arrowError, Console.arrowWarn, Console.arrowInfo)
WARNING (Console.labelWarn)

The => are sometimes indented, so they take an optional indent argument, showing how
many spaces to indent by.

The wrapper interface would be less complicated, if there was a more unified conceit behind our
terminal messages. If there is one, it is not documented. My hope is that, in many cases,
moving these to Console will make it easier for someone with great product sense to
clean up our terminal messages. It will also make it easier to write such messages, since
it will be easier to follow an accepted standard.

In the codebase outside of Console:

- Went through and looked at our use of Console.error/info/etc, replacing with rawError/etc
whenever approporiate.

- Went through and modified most of 'stdout' and 'stderr' calls to use the new functions.
I made an exception for stuff that doesn't want a new line at the end, or otherwise does
weird things (ex: print user logs directly), on the basis that, at this juncture, it is
better to be safe than to be sorry.

- Long messages no longer need to break the code style guide by ignoring indentation rules.
Fixed that where approporiate.

- Fixed the tests! A number of our stock messages are actually longer than 80 chars.

- Personal favourite: The Android license agreement is now line wrapped! Much better experience.

- There is some more work to do on:
- longform help (currently comes with built-in linebreaks, would have to change the entire
mechanism for how that works)
- Buildmessage sometimes has headers that start with =>, but they are short. I didn't want to
pass wrapper options all the way to main.captureOrExit before merging the rest of this and
making sure that we like it. Since these messages are fairly short, I don't think that's
likely to be a serious problem.

I hope that this makes life easier for us in the future! No more counting chars, no more breaking
the style guide. Better experience for users with wider terminals (or even shorter terminals!).
Let's give this a try.