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> That's another solution but I fundamentally disagree it is a better one. eg what if people are dyslexic or partially sighted so have their terminal configured

> That's another solution but I fundamentally disagree it is a better one. eg what if people are dyslexic or partially sighted so have their terminal configured for readability reasons? What the developer is doing is overriding that accessibility setting. those points are totally valid and really important. I can't help but think of what the implications are for them on the web though. Sure we, as users, can control font choice and size for readability but color? Realistically the only thing i think you could do is install a plugin that compensates for various forms of color blindness by shifting the colors. maybe _that_ is the right solution to the color blindness on the cli... modify your shell to run all input through a color shifter. I can't think of ever having seen an example of this but... it shouldn't be too hard AND for people without color blindness you could customize the behavior so that it shifted the output of apps like this one to colors more useful / happy-making to you. I expect to be proven wrong about the "shouldn't be too hard" shortly.... ;) > 1/ if you're running a white (or any other coloured) terminal then odds are you've already changed the other colours to suite (since other applications use the 3/4bit standard as well). That doesn't seem right to me. The people i see running white terminals almost completely overlap with the people who have done NO customization. > It's a CLI tool, not a fancy graphical package. I have issues with this general approach to CLI apps. As someone who basically lives in the terminal every day I am regularly disappointed by just how poor the current state of cli UI is. There are SO many opportunities for them to be providing me with useful feedback by leveraging colors, and emoji, and formatting and most of them... just don't. This kind of UI / UX helps avoid bad data entry, mistaken choices, etc.... There are a lot of young folks writing new cli tools in nodejs these days AND thinking about how they can make the visuals more useful to the user. I totally applaud this approach. But, you're right about not taking disabilities into account.

laumars 8y ago
Re web Vs CLI: I think most browsers have a readability mode or something where you can click a button and just the article body is retained; without CSS formatting and stuff. But yes you're right, accessibility is a really big problem with the web. There are screen readers but some pages even break those :( at least with the CLI, there is no real need to add colour beyond vanity (and i have no issue with it being used for vanities sake either, just so long as it doesnt render the text unreadable on my term) Re CLIs should be more graphical. I both agree and disagree. The issue with user input and mistakes etc is more down to the tooling and/or user experience than the CLI itself. This is actually why I'm writing my own shell at the moment. I'm trying to address some of the discoverability issues that traditional shells have. A bit like Fish tries to do except mine is more programmer orientated. I do actually think modern terminals would benefit from supporting richer content but I really don't think that should be at the cost of breaking the basics we come to expect (tools can be pipelined, shells can be customised, etc). I think if the web has taught us anything, it's that developers cannot be trusted with UIs. I know that sounds harsh but every webpage is themed differently and on the whole it's a bit of a UX nightmare. Where as CLI tools need to work homogeneously together. Coloured output breaks this because many developers (particularly the nodejs ones it seems) forget to check if the tool is outputting to a TTY or not. This matters because it prevents the user from doing the following without writing a load of crap escape sequences that won't render in your text editor: todo list | grep urgent > urgent.txt This is a point I think some of the more recent converters to the CLI miss. They view their tool as an application like a webpage or desktop GUI where as CLI tools frequently need to be used like Lego brick that connect to a bigger build. (Maybe I'm being a bit unfair here and the stuff I've seen posted on HN in recent months isn't representative of the wider scene?) But in any case, even with the arguements of accessibility aside, my personal preference would be developers avoided using colour until they've learned how to dynamically detect the appropriate times to use it.

laumars 8y ago

Re web Vs CLI: I think most browsers have a readability mode or something where you can click a button and just the article body is retained; without CSS formatting and stuff. But yes you're right, accessibility is a really big problem with the web. There are screen readers but some pages even break those :( at least with the CLI, there is no real need to add colour beyond vanity (and i have no issue with it being used for vanities sake either, just so long as it doesnt render the text unreadable on my term) Re CLIs should be more graphical. I both agree and disagree. The issue with user input and mistakes etc is more down to the tooling and/or user experience than the CLI itself. This is actually why I'm writing my own shell at the moment. I'm trying to address some of the discoverability issues that traditional shells have. A bit like Fish tries to do except mine is more programmer orientated. I do actually think modern terminals would benefit from supporting richer content but I really don't think that should be at the cost of breaking the basics we come to expect (tools can be pipelined, shells can be customised, etc). I think if the web has taught us anything, it's that developers cannot be trusted with UIs. I know that sounds harsh but every webpage is themed differently and on the whole it's a bit of a UX nightmare. Where as CLI tools need to work homogeneously together. Coloured output breaks this because many developers (particularly the nodejs ones it seems) forget to check if the tool is outputting to a TTY or not. This matters because it prevents the user from doing the following without writing a load of crap escape sequences that won't render in your text editor: todo list | grep urgent > urgent.txt This is a point I think some of the more recent converters to the CLI miss. They view their tool as an application like a webpage or desktop GUI where as CLI tools frequently need to be used like Lego brick that connect to a bigger build. (Maybe I'm being a bit unfair here and the stuff I've seen posted on HN in recent months isn't representative of the wider scene?) But in any case, even with the arguements of accessibility aside, my personal preference would be developers avoided using colour until they've learned how to dynamically detect the appropriate times to use it.