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> I'd love to hear good reasoning why using color by default is bad. About 1 in 12 men and about 1 in 200 women have some kind of color vision deficiency. Most

> I'd love to hear good reasoning why using color by default is bad. About 1 in 12 men and about 1 in 200 women have some kind of color vision deficiency. Most commonly they have difficulty distinguishing green and red*. The default color choices essentially never account for this. * Yes this does mean traffic lights are a problem. Fortunately for Americans, the red light is either far left or on top.

burke 3y ago
Terminals fortunately make it quite easy to map the basic 8 colors to whatever you like. There are very few people who can’t select 8 mutually distinguishable colours. They could even choose shades of grey! This is an argument against using 256-color or true color though.
- JdeBP 3y ago
  No it isn't. The 256 colour system is based upon a palette, too. Indeed, in almost all terminal emulators it is the same palette as the AIXTerm 16 colour system, which just uses its first 16 entries. (They could be theoretically two different palettes. I know of no terminal emulator author who has implemented it this way. I thought of doing so, but even I didn't.)
pie_flavor 3y ago
If a color blind person can't distinguish between a green letter and a red letter, how does disabling color so both the green letter and the red letter are white help? If it mattered that you weren't able to distinguish between them, now nobody can. If it didn't, then the point's moot.
- nucleardog 3y ago
  Precisely. This is only an issue if the _only_ difference between an error and success message is the colour. As long as the information is communicated other ways as well, the colour is just a helpful thing for discriminating the messages and the loss of it by someone that’s colour blind, using a terminal with a configuration that doesn’t allow colour, or even just is sitting somewhere the sun is shining on their monitor and making colours hard to differentiate is… inconsequential.
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    > This is only an issue if the _only_ difference between an error and success message is the colour. Except that a color bind person doesn't see monochrome, they see color, but perceive it differently. So the color palette problem isn't confined to only red and green, but also to other colors, because the spectrum as a whole is distinguished differently. Also, red/green color deficiency, while the most common, isn't the only kind of color blindness.

burke 3y ago

Terminals fortunately make it quite easy to map the basic 8 colors to whatever you like. There are very few people who can’t select 8 mutually distinguishable colours. They could even choose shades of grey! This is an argument against using 256-color or true color though.

JdeBP 3y ago
No it isn't. The 256 colour system is based upon a palette, too. Indeed, in almost all terminal emulators it is the same palette as the AIXTerm 16 colour system, which just uses its first 16 entries. (They could be theoretically two different palettes. I know of no terminal emulator author who has implemented it this way. I thought of doing so, but even I didn't.)

pie_flavor 3y ago

If a color blind person can't distinguish between a green letter and a red letter, how does disabling color so both the green letter and the red letter are white help? If it mattered that you weren't able to distinguish between them, now nobody can. If it didn't, then the point's moot.

nucleardog 3y ago
Precisely. This is only an issue if the _only_ difference between an error and success message is the colour. As long as the information is communicated other ways as well, the colour is just a helpful thing for discriminating the messages and the loss of it by someone that’s colour blind, using a terminal with a configuration that doesn’t allow colour, or even just is sitting somewhere the sun is shining on their monitor and making colours hard to differentiate is… inconsequential.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  > This is only an issue if the _only_ difference between an error and success message is the colour. Except that a color bind person doesn't see monochrome, they see color, but perceive it differently. So the color palette problem isn't confined to only red and green, but also to other colors, because the spectrum as a whole is distinguished differently. Also, red/green color deficiency, while the most common, isn't the only kind of color blindness.