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Don't most terminal emulators allow you to set your own color palette? So what would show up as yellow text on a normal black background, you could change to sh

Don't most terminal emulators allow you to set your own color palette? So what would show up as yellow text on a normal black background, you could change to show up as maybe as gold? Obviously it would mess with the meaning behind why the developer chose that particular color (like red errors, yellow or orange warnings) but I'm sure you'd get used to it.

hamburglar 5y ago
Even though my terminal lets me do that, I’d rather just disable colors on some programs that choose poorly than spend time configuring that. I like your basic red=failure stuff so I don’t want to disable color entirely but I’m not going to spend time tweaking just because some joker decided dark blue on black looks neat.
laumars 5y ago
There’s a few different sets of ansi escape sequences for managing colour. The ones you’re on about are the 8/16 colour palette. Unfortunately there is a trend these days for developers to use 8-bit (256 colours) pallet or even the true colour (24-bit). Both of the latter are not customisable in the terminal. Coincidentally I’ve gone into rants a number of times in the past on here about developers not using the correct colour palettes and the answer I always receive back for why it’s ok is because “developers should be able to chose how their application looks like”, which is fine if they control the entire design stack like they would on a website. But it makes zero sense in the terminal.
- brundolf 5y ago
  Interesting, I didn't realize both kinds of control characters existed [checks the color library I'm currently using to build a CLI]
- tetha 5y ago
  That makes sense. I've been wondering if we've been doing something subtly awkward with our internal tooling. However, most are just using the 8 or 16 color palette with a simple convention like "Use red (or technically, color 1, which just happens to be red for us) as error, yellow as warning, green as success" and let the terminal theme and the user figure out how it should look on their screen.
layer8 5y ago
As the GP says, the problem is when the color is specified as RGB triples by the software.
- ziml77 5y ago
  I find it's more of a problem when applications use the color palette instead of 24-bit color. Someone might pick foreground and background colors that contrast perfectly well in their 8 color palette, but that in mine are impossible to distinguish. And changing them for one case might break legibility somewhere else. When the colors come from the 24-bit RGB selection, contrast will always be as the author intended. I've had that problem with the default LS_COLORS/DIR_COLORS settings in some Linux installs. It's very annoying.
  - account42 5y ago
    If your palette does not have good contrast between foreground colors 31-37 and background color 40, that's on you. If you cange the default background color to something other than 40 that's also on you - if you want the default background to be white, change the palette so that color 40 is white (instead of changing the backgound color to e.g. 47) and make the foreground colors dark enough so that they contrast well.
twic 5y ago
That configuration would be at the terminal level, but it would potentially need to be different for each program. The default ls colours are fine, and i don't want to change them, but the colours in our internal package management tool are broken, and i do. Given the existence of shell pipelines, i might even want different palettes within a single stream of output, so this mapping couldn't even be done by hooking command execution to apply a different mapping in the terminal.

hamburglar 5y ago

Even though my terminal lets me do that, I’d rather just disable colors on some programs that choose poorly than spend time configuring that. I like your basic red=failure stuff so I don’t want to disable color entirely but I’m not going to spend time tweaking just because some joker decided dark blue on black looks neat.

laumars 5y ago

There’s a few different sets of ansi escape sequences for managing colour. The ones you’re on about are the 8/16 colour palette. Unfortunately there is a trend these days for developers to use 8-bit (256 colours) pallet or even the true colour (24-bit). Both of the latter are not customisable in the terminal. Coincidentally I’ve gone into rants a number of times in the past on here about developers not using the correct colour palettes and the answer I always receive back for why it’s ok is because “developers should be able to chose how their application looks like”, which is fine if they control the entire design stack like they would on a website. But it makes zero sense in the terminal.

brundolf 5y ago
Interesting, I didn't realize both kinds of control characters existed [checks the color library I'm currently using to build a CLI]
tetha 5y ago
That makes sense. I've been wondering if we've been doing something subtly awkward with our internal tooling. However, most are just using the 8 or 16 color palette with a simple convention like "Use red (or technically, color 1, which just happens to be red for us) as error, yellow as warning, green as success" and let the terminal theme and the user figure out how it should look on their screen.

layer8 5y ago

As the GP says, the problem is when the color is specified as RGB triples by the software.

ziml77 5y ago
I find it's more of a problem when applications use the color palette instead of 24-bit color. Someone might pick foreground and background colors that contrast perfectly well in their 8 color palette, but that in mine are impossible to distinguish. And changing them for one case might break legibility somewhere else. When the colors come from the 24-bit RGB selection, contrast will always be as the author intended. I've had that problem with the default LS_COLORS/DIR_COLORS settings in some Linux installs. It's very annoying.
- account42 5y ago
  If your palette does not have good contrast between foreground colors 31-37 and background color 40, that's on you. If you cange the default background color to something other than 40 that's also on you - if you want the default background to be white, change the palette so that color 40 is white (instead of changing the backgound color to e.g. 47) and make the foreground colors dark enough so that they contrast well.

twic 5y ago

That configuration would be at the terminal level, but it would potentially need to be different for each program. The default ls colours are fine, and i don't want to change them, but the colours in our internal package management tool are broken, and i do. Given the existence of shell pipelines, i might even want different palettes within a single stream of output, so this mapping couldn't even be done by hooking command execution to apply a different mapping in the terminal.