Use std::io::IsTerminal to detect if you’re running in the terminal in Rust

• Tagged with rust
• Posted 6 October 2024

This allows me to suppress ANSI escape codes if the output is going somewhere other than the terminal.

In my dominant_colours tool, I use ANSI escape sequences to print coloured text to the console. I to detect if my code was running in the terminal, or if it was running in a non-terminal environment where those escape codes would be unhelpful (e.g. being redirected to a file).

I found a Stack Overflow answer that suggested using std::io::IsTerminal, which worked perfectly. Here’s a simple example:

use std::io::IsTerminal;

fn main() {
    if std::io::stdout().is_terminal() {
        println!("This text is \x1b[0;31mred\x1b[0m and \x1b[0;34mblue\x1b[0m");
    } else {
        println!("This text is not coloured");
    }
}

I added this to dominant_colours in pull request #65.