Hey, late to the party, and I get the sense this patch set isn't going to fly, so I hope I'm not adding salt to the wound.
You're not really late to the party: you might recall contributing to this thread on June 6, 2013. What bothered me about the pacman-color patch was how half-hazard the
-Si/-Qi colouring is. The important bits (to me, of course) aren't colourized. The repository and URL are not very important. Dependency information, on the other hand, is. 90% of the time I search the pacman database, what I care about is the description and the dependencies - both demphasized with their implemented colouring scheme.
Maybe the description and dependencies can be given other colours once my patch is included.
By attempting to colourizing individual fields IMHO we'll either end up with a soup of colours that ends up more distracting then informational, or we make the wrong choice, emphasizing the wrong stuff and making the output harder to read. The current way is at least a nice balance that doesn't fall into either pitfalls.
In order to be consistent, the repository, name, version, and groups should all be coloured. The pacman -Sl output, these days, is too colourful in my opinion and I
kinda regret it. I do wish it less bright. Something closer to only the package name and maybe the "[installed]" bit should have colour.
I think it looks good; the colours are so different from each other that there's no confusion.