CLI terminal output

Two things decide what the civitai CLI puts on your screen: whether styling is on, and what the human renderers do with text a server or another user supplied. Neither applies to --json.

The global flags, and one that is not

--no-color, --color, --no-update-check and -h / --help are accepted by every command — civitai --help lists them all. -v / --version is root-only: civitai --version prints the version, but on a subcommand it is not a flag at all (civitai app validate --version fails with unknown flag: --version, exit 2). From a script use civitai version — version, commit and build date — which works from anywhere.

civitai --help also prints the exit-code contract. --no-update-check (or CIVITAI_NO_UPDATE_CHECK) skips the background check for a newer release; the nag it suppresses only goes to stderr, so it is about clean logs, not clean stdout (see Clean output for pipelines).

Colour is off by default whenever stdout is not a TTY

A redirected or piped run already emits plain text with no escape sequences. To override that, the precedence is, highest first:

1. --no-color / NO_COLOR / CIVITAI_NO_COLOR → off
2. --color / CLICOLOR_FORCE / CIVITAI_COLOR → on
3. TERM=dumb → off
4. otherwise: auto — on if the stream being written to is a TTY, off if it is not

Off always beats on, so a NO_COLOR in the environment cannot be re-enabled by a --color further down a pipeline. TERM=dumb sits below force-on, so CLICOLOR_FORCE=1 in a TERM=dumb shell still styles. Auto is resolved per stream: one run can write plain text to a piped stdout and styled text to a TTY stderr. The force tiers apply to both.

The CIVITAI_* variables are parsed as BOOLEANS

CIVITAI_NO_COLOR is not a drop-in for NO_COLOR

It parses its value, and silently ignores anything it cannot parse.

NO_COLOR and CLICOLOR_FORCE are presence tests; CIVITAI_NO_COLOR and CIVITAI_COLOR go through the CLI's config layer and are read as booleans.

Variable	What counts
NO_COLOR	no-color.org: present and non-empty, whatever the value — so even NO_COLOR=0 disables colour
CLICOLOR_FORCE	present, non-empty and not 0
CIVITAI_NO_COLOR, CIVITAI_COLOR	a boolean: only twelve spellings mean anything

The twelve spellings are 1, t, T, TRUE, true, True (on) and 0, f, F, FALSE, false, False (off). Anything else — yes, on, y, enabled, 2, an empty string — parses as false with no warning. So CIVITAI_NO_COLOR=yes does not disable colour, CIVITAI_NO_COLOR=1 does, and CIVITAI_NO_COLOR=0 leaves colour alone — unlike NO_COLOR=0, which disables it. When in doubt use 1, or the plain NO_COLOR spelling.

What a table cell can contain

Almost every value in a human table — a model name, a username, a tag, a workflow status, a block id — is text a stranger uploaded or a server chose. The human renderers put all of it through one gate:

• Terminal escapes and invisible characters are removed, so a hostile value cannot overwrite a line the CLI already printed or reorder what you read.
• A table cell is one line and one column. A newline or tab in a server-supplied cell value becomes a space.
• Genuinely multi-line text keeps its line breaks, indented under the line that introduced it, so a continuation never sits at column zero.
• Two values are cut at 120 characters: the download progress line and generate's could not read your Buzz balance warning. Nothing else is shortened.
• What you typed splits by value, not by screen. Your prompt, negative prompt, --aspect-ratio, --ecosystem and the ids you give workflows cancel never go through the gate. Paths you name are shown exactly on the confirmation screen before a spend, but filtered in several other lines that report a path.

The full rules: which characters, which fields, which limits

Which characters are stripped. Escape and control bytes (cursor moves, line clears, OSC sequences), plus every character Unicode marks default-ignorable — zero-width spaces and joiners, the bidi overrides that reverse the order a line is displayed in, the variation selectors (except the one that keeps an emoji looking like an emoji) — plus two runes that paint nothing while Unicode files them as a symbol and a mark, and four Hangul fillers that paint nothing while Unicode files them as letters. Punctuation, accents, CJK, emoji, ordinary letters and right-to-left script survive, as do the format characters Unicode says must be drawn. U+2028 / U+2029 are passed through (no terminal is known to break lines on them).

The strip is not free. Each removed character is invisible on its own, but some change how their neighbours are drawn: an emoji built from a zero-width joiner renders as its components, a subdivision flag falls back to 🏴, and text that uses the join controls to make a distinction loses it — Persian/Arabic (می‌روم renders joined), Malayalam (the chillu ണ്‍ becomes ണ്, a different letter), Devanagari, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada, Sinhala and Mongolian.

Values you supplied. The promise splits by value, not by screen. Your prompt, your negative prompt, --aspect-ratio, --ecosystem and the ids you give workflows cancel never go through the gate. The paths you name are different: they are echoed exactly on the confirmation screen before a spend, which has to show what will really be sent, and filtered in several of the lines that report a path elsewhere. Some other values you supply are filtered too, and no surface enumerates the set — these are the known cases, not its boundary:

1. a value read out of an --input file is filtered like server text, because a graph file can be downloaded or generated;
2. civitai download filters the target path it reports even when you set it with --out, because the same variable holds a server-chosen file name in its other branches;
3. civitai download also filters the values you give --root and --for-base, in the lines that report them.

The quote civitai generate --dry-run prints is not the confirmation screen: it prints <not checked by --dry-run> in place of both prompt rows, because the estimate is priced on a graph with that text removed. Do not read one as a preview of the other.

Which fields are flattened to one line. Every server-supplied value in a rendered table cell — models search, images search, app status, workflows list, the pre-spend cost table, and the rest. A newline would start a line at column zero that looks like a CLI row; a tab would add an extra, aligned column. Single-line label: value fields are flattened the same way: images … --meta's model, sampler, seed, resources, cfg, steps and url; app status --id's live URL and block id; app listing status's screenshot ids and captions; the --no-wait re-attach hint; and generate's wait-path lines (the submit receipt, the poll's status line, the server's message when a status check fails and is retried, and the re-attach block printed when a wait ends without a result). That list is illustrative, not exhaustive. Other one-off detail lines — the header block above models get's version table, collections get, app view — have escapes stripped but may still carry a newline.

Which surfaces keep line breaks. Five: the generation prompt and negative prompt (images … --meta), the orchestrator's failure reason (workflows get and workflows list), the same reason on generate's error path, per-output exclusion reasons (generate), and the reviewer's rejection reason / approval notes (app status --id). If a field you expect to be multi-line arrives on one line, it was in a cell.

Why two values are shortened. The progress line and the balance warning sit directly above something the CLI asserts — a Saved … (SHA256 verified) line, and the Cost: … Buzz line you approve a spend on — and a value long enough to wrap could write extra rows that read as the CLI's own. The cut is marked …. The Saved … line, the download plan and every table cell print values in full.

Known limits. The CLI never asks how wide your terminal is. Shortening bounds how many rows a value takes, not whether one starts at column zero, and the 120-character budget counts characters, not columns, so wide (CJK) text takes twice the space. Every other long value can soft-wrap to column zero, and one hostile value widens a column for every row. Only workflows list wraps its reason text, to a fixed budget of 79 columns, of which the server's text gets 75 (each line has a four-space indent) — so a 77-rune reason wraps. Wrapping collapses whitespace runs and breaks a token longer than the line, but drops no words; in a narrower terminal, or with wide characters, the terminal re-wraps and can still reach column zero. Generation prompts are deliberately not soft-wrapped, because collapsing whitespace or splitting tokens would alter prompt weights and syntax.

--json is never styled or sanitised

A script that renders server strings onto a terminal must sanitise them itself

--json bypasses the presentation layer entirely, at any colour setting, so it is always safe to pipe into jq. It is also emitted raw — JSON already escapes control characters, and rewriting the bytes would corrupt what a script parses — so none of the guarantees above apply to it.

Two adjacent transforms are documented elsewhere: the control-byte repair that changes a read body's bytes but not its document, and a server-side sanitiser that rewrites a failure message before the CLI sees it. The CLI reproduces neither.

Where to go next

• CLI — installing the binary, and the read and download commands.
• CLI troubleshooting — look up the message you got.
• Scripting the CLI with --json — what the machine-readable output guarantees.
• Exit codes — the full per-code ledger is in the CLI README.