Color & terminal

claudex uses color for scannability — project names, costs, counts, and timestamps each have a distinct color so a report reads at a glance. The palette is defined in src/ui.rs; commands never reach for colors directly.

Controlling color

claudex cost --color auto     # default — color iff stdout is a TTY
claudex cost --color always   # force color on, even through pipes
claudex cost --color never    # no ANSI codes ever

The flag is global — put it anywhere on the command line.

NO_COLOR=1 (the widely-adopted convention) disables color automatically when --color is at its default auto.

Why "auto" does the right thing

Auto checks whether stdout is a terminal and whether NO_COLOR is set. When you pipe into less or jq, ANSI escape codes would show up as garbage; claudex detects that and drops them.

Forcing color through a pipe

less -R preserves ANSI codes. Combine with --color always:

claudex sessions --color always | less -R

clap help also honors --color

claudex peeks at argv before clap parses, so claudex --help --color never produces plain help text. Handy when piping help into a file for docs.

Palette roles

Role	Used for
project	Project names, headlines
cost	Dollar amounts (bolded for readability)
count	Numeric counts with thousands separators
dim	Timestamps, session ID prefixes, neutral metadata
model	Model name (Opus / Sonnet / Haiku)
role	Message roles (user, assistant) in search output

On the Claude-branded docs site you're reading right now, the palette echoes these roles — coral for brand / cost, cream for surfaces, deep ink for text.

Tables

Human output uses a minimal comfy-table layout with no header separator and dynamic width detection via terminal_size. Columns auto-wrap on narrow terminals.

If your terminal lies about its width (common with certain multiplexers), set COLUMNS manually:

COLUMNS=180 claudex cost

Spinners

ensure_fresh shows a spinner on stderr during the initial sync so you don't think the command hung. The spinner is TTY-gated — you never see it in pipelines, and it doesn't pollute --json output.