Do other people not like colors? or: adventures with ANSI codes and grep

I feel like setting these kinds of options is best done with an alias for this reason, so as to not affect scripts. of course, --color=always will still annoy you whenever you put grep in a pipeline at the shell prompt. the author would presumably not have had these problems were she to have used --color=auto from the beginning.

I find colors to be distracting, but I admit that they're sometimes useful. however, anything outputting sequences should check if stdout is actually a terminal! (one does often want color when outputting to a pager, but you can just specify a different flag in that case)