[BUG] Update notice has black background even on white terminals

[fregante]

Self-explanatory 👇

My terminal theme has a white background (macOS default) but npm unnecessarily shows the update notice with a black color.

Environment:

• OS: macOS 11.2.3
• Node: 15.12.0
• npm: 7.6.3
• Fish Shell 3.2.1

I don't know if this has already been addressed since it will only appear when I'm not running the latest version.

[nickfryar]

The background for the update notifier is being set here:

cli/lib/utils/update-notifier.js

Line 112 in a4e7f4e

const messagec = !useColor ? message : chalk.bgBlack.white(message)

And per chalk/chalk#102 it appears there's no way to detect background color in the terminal.

[fregante]

I think the point is to not use bgBlack nor white at all. They should just be the default color as defined by the terminal. It makes no sense to set a black background on a black terminal in the first place. Same goes for a white text on a black terminal.

[nickfryar]

Does this extend to all cases of bgBlack? I found 8 instances of this with various colors in the cli. If it's just a case of removing bgBlack / bgBlack + white, I can open a PR for this. I'm still new to this repo though, so some direction on this would be appreciated!

[fregante]

It appears that in most cases it's trying to highlight a line. I think the correct solution for that is to use the inverse function instead, but I'm not familiar with either project to tell you for sure.

[nickfryar]

Chalk supports inverse, but ansicolors does not. All but one case of bgBlack use chalk, so that one exception can likely just be switched from ansicolors to chalk.

However, npmlog handles the highlighting differently, so the npm notice text in your screenshot above would still appear with a black background. What is the typical process for making changes in dependencies for the cli, such as this?

[wraithgar]

this is now half fixed as of v7.20.0.

npmlog itself having forced black backgrounds for certain levels is going to be a separate fix.

[lukekarrys]

This was fixed by 9216d59 and included in npm@10.7.0.