Description of problem: Zanata client is a command line tool and use console. It should color its output so that important information is easier to catch attention.
http://jansi.fusesource.org/index.html can be used. Current impediments: - unpredictable client console's background color thus hard to pick a foreground color that is contrast enough - we use resource bundle (ATM only in init command) to store actual messages. The message itself is in printf format which makes it hard to tokenize/color individual parts (i.e. ansi color an argument before passing it to printf may result in exception if the template is %d) - need to either have all commands done or none. Otherwise will end up with inconsistency. - some information are passed to user in form of log. Some are in form of console output. May need a way to unify these. NB, log can be turned off.
Things to consider (quoted from Sean in one of the review comments): From a scriptability point of view, it is good to output to stdout and stderr, which can be redirected to pipes, grepped, etc. If this were C, I would suggest using isatty(stdout) to decide whether to use fancy console features or just write to stdout. In Java, it might be better to have a command line option (eg --avoid-console or --plaintext).
Reassigned to PM
Migrated; check JIRA for bug status: http://zanata.atlassian.net/browse/ZNTA-571