Could emerge output be set to non-colored mode (e.g. when output stream is not a TTY or $TERM is not set)? That would a big help if your terminal doesn't support colors, or not that kind of color codes, or you want to use some filter program (like less).
Options: export NOCOLOR=true | less -r | sed 's:.\[[0-9;]*m::g'
well, since the functionality already exists, could it be documented somewhere ? (or does it ;]) maybe the man files for make.defaults(5) and make.conf(5) should be updated to reflect all the current vars that affect emerge ... they were last updated with portage 1.7.8 :/
Hm, that solution is not very Unixish, I believe. But ls(1) isn't, too. ,-(
Portage 2.0.24 will disable color if sys.stdout isn't a tty. Yay! :)
