When I wrote “five-and-a-bit colour”, I meant “five colours, plus very limited use of two more colours”. The word “bit” was unfortunate. “The standard ansi col

When I wrote “five-and-a-bit colour”, I meant “five colours, plus very limited use of two more colours”. The word “bit” was unfortunate. “The standard ansi colors (including bright variants)” are a sham. Basically no one has used those specific values for decades. (Well, actually, I think the Linux framebuffer console might still be? In a quick test, it does look about right. But few ever use it directly.) The whole approach is a crock. What you have to realise is that the first 16 colours are in a sense semi-semantic colours, though that’s not quite the right term for what I want to describe; it’s more a provided palette of named colours, perhaps. Trying to translate from exact colours to semi-semantic colours is… well, it’s generally not a great idea, not how you should treat those colours. For best results, you want to deliberately design for 16-colour and 24-bit-colour, deliberately choosing values that may not be the same value. There are two classes of light terminal colour schemes: what I will call “true”, where black is black, white is white, bright/high-intensity yellow is brighter and higher intensity than regular yellow, &c.; and what I will call “flipped”, where black is white, white is black, bright/high-intensity yellow is darker and probably less intense than regular yellow, &c. The trouble is that the starting palette is ambiguous, because it was designed for dark terminals, but when you apply things to light terminals, some apps assume “true” treatment of colours (that is, that if I ask for white you’ll give me white, regardless of the default colours) and others “flipped” (that is, that when I ask for white, I actually just want a neutral colour that has high contrast with the default background colour); so both will be broken for at least some schemes. (But I should perhaps perform a survey of actual light colour schemes so that I can determine the prevalence of the two approaches. In my own, I went “true”.)