Colour and interactivity

cdno’s human-readable output is coloured, and several read commands offer to open one of the rows they just printed. Both behaviours are for people at a terminal, and both switch themselves off the moment the output is going somewhere else.

Cards

Listings whose items carry prose — project list, portfolio list, stewardship list, questions, search, and the active-projects section of orient — render as cards: a coloured bar down the left of every line an item owns, the identifier as a title, a badge aligned into a shared column, and the text wrapped underneath.

3 active projects

▎ surrogate    side-project
▎ Six contributors settled; scope is fixed to the solver rather than the
▎ mesher, and the validation plan is agreed.
▎ next: Draft the validation plan

▎ mesh         work
▎ Coarse-mesh run validated end to end; two workstreams in flight.
▎ next: Profile the assembly step

What the bar’s colour means depends on the listing, and it is always the thing that listing exists to surface: context for project list and orient, staleness for portfolio list and stewardship list (amber once nothing has been filed for a month), and domain for questions. search colours every hit alike — relevance is already the ordering.

Commands whose rows are genuinely tabular keep their tables — status, commitments, orient’s commitments section, and a portfolio’s evidence list all have short, aligned fields where a column beats a card. show commands keep their plain line shape too: a bar earns its space by marking where one item ends and the next begins, and a detail view has only one item.

note list is untouched. It prints one bare path per line because it exists to be piped into other tools, and a header or a gutter would break that.

Colour

--colour is accepted as a spelling of the same flag.

Under auto, three environment variables are consulted, in this order:

1. NO_COLOR (set and non-empty) turns colour off.
2. CLICOLOR=0 turns colour off.
3. CLICOLOR_FORCE (set and non-empty) turns colour on even when redirected.

NO_COLOR deliberately outranks CLICOLOR_FORCE: NO_COLOR is something you export once as a preference about your own terminal, while CLICOLOR_FORCE is usually set by a harness that has no standing to override it. An explicit --color outranks all three.

--json output is never coloured, whatever any of the above says. Scripts can pass --color always safely.

Plain output

cdno open is deliberately outside all of the above. It prints one absolute path, and --list prints one tab-separated row per note — no cards, no colour, no alignment, whatever the terminal is. Both are written to be consumed by another program ($(…), fzf, cut), and a colour escape or a padded column would corrupt them. The tab is load-bearing: it is what fzf --delimiter='\t' splits on.

Interactive reports

In a terminal, project list, portfolio list, stewardship list, orient, status, and search follow their output with a picker:

? Inspect a project
❯ surrogate (side-project)
  mesh (work)
  garden (family)
[↑↓ to move, enter to inspect, Esc to leave]

Choosing a row prints exactly what the matching show command would print, then asks again. Esc or Ctrl-C leaves, with exit status 0.

search is the exception, and deliberately: choosing a hit opens it in your editor and the command ends there, rather than returning to the list. Once an editor has the file, coming back to the search results is not what anyone wants. cdno open’s own picker behaves the same way.

The listing is always printed first, so the prompt only ever adds to what you would have seen. It is skipped entirely when:

• either stdin or stdout is not a terminal — piped, redirected, < /dev/null, a background job, or running under CI, which is the usual reason neither end is a terminal,
• --no-interactive is passed,
• --json is passed, or
• the terminal is narrower than 20 columns, which is too narrow to draw a picker in.

Both streams matter: the listing is written to stdout but the picker reads stdin, so a caller with a terminal on only one end is not offered the prompt. There is no separate CI detection — a CI job has no terminal, and that is what actually decides it.

That makes the same command safe for a person, a shell pipeline, and an AI agent without changing anything about how it is invoked.

Width

On a terminal, output is laid out to the terminal’s width as measured when the command runs. Text with nowhere to break — a long URL, a long slug, or Thai and Lao, which need dictionary-based word segmentation cdno does not yet do — runs past the edge rather than being cut, on the grounds that a path you can copy beats a path that fits. cdno prints once and exits, so resizing afterwards does not reflow anything already on screen — run the command again. Everywhere else — piped, redirected, or when the terminal reports no usable size (a pty opened without one reports zero columns) — it lays out to a fixed 100 columns, so captured output is deterministic and diffable.

Text from your notes is sanitised before it is laid out — in listings and in show views alike, and in card titles as well as bodies. Tabs and carriage returns become spaces; other control characters, including escape sequences, are replaced. A note is data, and without this a stray escape in a note could repaint the terminal, move the cursor, or draw over the card’s own gutter. The raw markdown is of course untouched, and cdno note still prints paths verbatim.