Except all those times you don't want color at all.
> By and large I think terminfo/$TERM is outdated, or at least partly.
It's not outdated. It's a Chesterton's fence. Disregard for interoperability and feature discovery is why the terminal ecosystem has such immense difficulty getting traction on advanced features.
NO_COLOR exists, and is fairly widely supported. TERM=dumb to disable colour was always a hack at best because this also disables other things like "clear line" and generally leads to weird output.
> It's a Chesterton's fence.
It's not. The world has changed. Everyone uses \x1b[1m to make text bold today but in the past there were a few dozen ways from different vendors of (hardware) terminals to make text bold. But this situation no longer exists. Like I already said: you still need it for some things – there's a reason I compiled a "safe terminal escape code" list. But for many things you don't.
NO_COLOR is far from universally supported (even people who bother to check TERM don't know about it) and typically isn't configured to pass through sudo or ssh.
I never claimed that. The sudo or ssh configuration is up to you. Or else there's |cat, which often works when NO_COLOR doesn't.
Either way, terminfo was never intended to allow users to disable colours. Certainly not via TERM=dumb – that was always a hack. If you want to disable colours then there are better ways.
> By and large I think terminfo/$TERM is outdated, or at least partly.
It's not outdated. It's a Chesterton's fence. Disregard for interoperability and feature discovery is why the terminal ecosystem has such immense difficulty getting traction on advanced features.