Have you already tried something like node-pty?

It'd be great if the developer tool could force TTY to be available in the child process.

It might help if you could be more specific here – you can’t create TTYs without using native modules like @mscdex mentioned at the moment, and while a libuv feature along those lines might be possible, is there a chance that it might help more to control Node.js’s behaviour in these situations?

For example, I’ve recently had a conversation in which the idea of forcing Node.js core to enable color mode for its output was brought up. I think that would be a reasonable request, and something that developers right now might try to solve by manually creating TTYs.

For example, I’ve recently had a conversation in which the idea of forcing Node.js core to enable color mode for its output was brought up.

Is this something other than setting the FORCE_COLOR env var that node currently respects?

It might help if you could be more specific here

Specifically for a test framework, if you want to test a TTY program you might need a TTY. I suppose node-pty could be used for that, but it doesn't look like something we at AVA would support directly.

Requiring a module which overwrites some modules to fake the TTY is conceptually easier, even if it's more liable to break.

If there was a flag to expose the TTY APIs on stdout and stderr it would solve many use cases for folks developing programs that use a TTY. Of course I don't know how hard this is to achieve within Node.js itself.

It sounds like what you're asking for is a quick fix, expose e.g. process.stdout.getWindowSize() even when process.stdout is not a tty? I don't think that's a good way forward.

Proper built-in pty support however might be so I've opened libuv/libuv#2640 to discuss.

It sounds like what you're asking for is a quick fix, expose e.g. process.stdout.getWindowSize() even when process.stdout is not a tty? I don't think that's a good way forward.

To be fair, I'm approaching this from a user's perspective, like " why can't I get this API in my child process".

Built-in pseudo-TTY support would also be great, and I can see how that's more "correct" for Node.js itself.

I ran into a similar scenario where I tried to run my own script with lint-staged (which, in turn, relies on execa to execute my script in a spawned child process). Since my script decides the input source based on process.stdin.isTTY, it wrongfully waits for data from process.stdin when it's invoked via child_process.spawn by execa... It took me a long time to figure this out...