feat: switch from picocolors to ansis

[webdiscus]

Hello @antfu,

I'm the author of ansis, a smaller and faster drop-in replacement for Chalk.

I know, Chalk@4 was already used, which was very large and had 2 dependencies.
So Chalk was replaced with Picocolors, here is the commit from Dec 28, 2021.

But these changes have "degraded" the code readability:

- import c from 'chalk'
+ import c from 'picocolors'

- console.log(c.yellow.inverse.bold`\n  Vite  `, name, '\n')
+ console.log(c.yellow(c.inverse(c.bold('\n  Vite  '))), name, '\n')
...

Nested calls leads to "Parenthesis Hell" and it works 2x slower than chained syntax for the example above.

With Ansis, we can return to the original "chalk-like" clean and more readable syntax, while still being as small as a Picocolors:

- import c from 'picocolors'
+ import c from 'ansis'

- console.log(c.yellow(c.inverse(c.bold('\n  Vite  '))), name, '\n')
+ console.log(c.yellow.inverse.bold`\n  Vite  `, name, '\n')
...

Unpacked package size

Ansis is almost as small as Picocolors:

• chalk@5: 44.2 kB
• picocolors - 6.4 kB
• аnsis - 6.8 kB

The difference with picocolors is 0.4 kB, but Ansis has the functionality of Chalk.
Picocolors doesn't handle important edge cases, so it is the smallest.

Today, the two smallest and fastest libraries are picocolors and ansis.
Both are recommended by the e18e community.

Popularity

• picocolors ~60m+ weekly downloads.
• ansis ~1.3m weekly downloads with steady growth. This is enough to be considered popular, though yet not as much as Picocolors.

Who already uses Ansis

unjs/webpackbar, NestJS, Sequelize, Salesforce CLI, Oclif, Facebook/stylex, Grafana

Test

The cmd npm run test:build outputs:

[pkg-pr-new]

Open in Stackblitz

npm i https://pkg.pr.new/unjs/unplugin@474

commit: 2440b78

[antfu]

I am actually looking for an alternative of picocolors because it's CJS-only. Thanks for your suggestion! I would be happy to replace all my packages' picocolors usage to ansis as well, if you also want to help on that :)

[webdiscus]

@antfu, yes of course, I want help you :)

[panoply]

Just chiming in here and apologies for any unwanted noise but wanted to vouch for Ansis. It’s a brilliant addition and just an all round fantastic module for ansi.