9 ms·

Terminal colours are tricky

371 points by chmaynard 2y ago

aragilar 2y ago
My personal rant is terminals where you cannot configure the default `TERM`.
geon 2y ago
I hate how the macos terminal "helpfully" adjusts colors. That just means I can't get my custom theme to look right.
guenthert 2y ago
'This made me wonder – if blue is colour number 5, who decides what hex color that should correspond to? The answer seems to be “there’s no standard, terminal emulators just choose colours and it’s not very consistent” ' That doesn't surprise me. What surprises me, is that there are people who apparently think that choosing a RGB value other than 0,0,0 for black would be a good idea. A lot of money is being spent to increase contrast and they are simply throwing it away (not to mention the wasted power on e.g. OLED devices).
- wruza 2y ago
  For many people, high-contrast text strains their eyes, leaves afterglows and blurs vision. Enjoy your issue-free vision while you’re relatively young and let us have our #ddd-on-#444 which we can read for more than two minutes.
niobe 2y ago
# see more colors from sys import argv def color(num, text): return f"\033[38;5;{num}m{text}\033[0m" i = int(argv[1]) if len(argv) > 1 else 16 for i in range(i): print(color(i, f"number {i:02}"))
m0rphling 2y ago
https://terminal.sexy https://terminal.sexy is a decent site I use for exploring and generating downloadable terminal color configs.
- mildzebrataste 2y ago
  I found this site recently and love it: https://terminaltinder.com/ https://terminaltinder.com/
ykonstant 2y ago
I came across all of these issues and many more trying to make a good light color scheme for my systems. Two interesting findings I did not see discussed: 1. It makes sense in retrospect, but I was very surprised at how much more subtle light themes are compared to dark when viewed on different screens; of course their hardware and software configs lead to variations on the color output, but light dominant changes are perceived so much more drastically than dark ones. This is a serious issue if you will be porting your theme to computers with a variety of screens and configurations. 2. Occasionally, you need to drop to a linux or bsd console with very limited support for fonts and fancy colors. Then your `fd` and `exa/lsd/whatever` may be unusable and annoying, especially if you have mapped the latter to `ls`. I managed, after a long struggle, to get a working fbterm in my system to get decent terminal features without X, but fbterm has its own issues. You need to account for this use-case, especially when configuring vim colorschemes: make sure that you have a fallback theme for a feature-poor console or you have really practiced typing vim commands blind :D Edit: here is a screenshot of my stylized fbterm screen, obviously not for serious work, but meant to demonstrate what you can do without X: https://i.imgur.com/RbDRgtD.png https://i.imgur.com/RbDRgtD.png
- weinzierl 2y ago
  Would you share how you configured your fbterm?
  - ykonstant 2y ago
    Here is a pastebin of my config, adapted from Lu Xu's dotfiles [0] https://pastebin.com/RgbgLUTq https://pastebin.com/RgbgLUTq [0] https://github.com/xlucn/dotfiles https://github.com/xlucn/dotfiles It is Lu Xu's dotfiles you should focus on if you want to understand how fb* tools work. I invoke fbterm via this script to set the bg image: #!/bin/sh # fbterm-bi: a wrapper script to enable background image with fbterm # usage: fbterm-bi /path/to/image fbterm-options printf '\033[?25l' # hide cursor fbv -ciuker "$1" << EOF q EOF shift export FBTERM_BACKGROUND_IMAGE=1 exec /bin/fbterm "$@"
    - 2y ago
rcarmo 2y ago
As someone who spent an hour yesterday trying to color match WezTerm and Apple Terminal to run vim legibly, this came in very handy,
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
Would be good to check colours (if you're someone who picks colours) against the new APCA algorithm (Advanced Perception of Colour), which will supersede the existing x:y one in the upcoming WCAG 3.0 (which may take a few years yet). APCA takes font size, weight, foreground/background, and even apparently ambient light/surroundings and intended purpose into consideration. It would be neat if terminal emulators could use the device's light sensor to optimize the contrast based on environmental factors.
- ykonstant 2y ago
  Oh, that is fascinating.
  - possibleworlds 2y ago
    The creator has a huge amount of docs surrounding the project that are quirky and very informative https://linktr.ee/Myndex https://linktr.ee/Myndex
- Narushia 2y ago
  I've actually done this manually for my current terminal color scheme, because I could not find a single premade theme that satisfied my personal contrast requirements for all the ANSI colors.
weinzierl 2y ago
The answer seems to be “there’s no standard, terminal emulators just choose colours and it’s not very consistent”. The colors themselves are one part of the equation, the other being the mapping to semantic elements, like GUI widgets or syntax groups. I feel there are some unwritten rules despite and beneath all the apparent inconsistency. For example keywords are almost universally somewhere in the red blue area, never green. For comments it's the opposite, most often greenish or grey. But this is all tacit and to the best if knowledge nowhere written down.
- chrismorgan 2y ago
  > For example keywords are almost universally somewhere in the red blue area, never green. This isn’t true. Blue’s probably most common these days, but black, orange, brown, yellow, green… they’re all pretty common, probably similarly common to red. In Pygments, the default theme even uses bold green for keywords. > For comments it's the opposite, most often greenish or grey. OK, this one’s more true. Other colours are sometimes used, but greens and greys are far and away the most common.
- o11c 2y ago
  > The answer seems to be “there’s no standard, terminal emulators just choose colours and it’s not very consistent”. It does seem like half this article is correctly answered by "there is a standard (VGA), but some terminals (and in particular, the Solarized colorschemes) trample all over it and break everything." Like, there are indeed a lot of buggy terminals, but Solarized will ONLY ever make things worse, since all correct programs assume something close to VGA.
hnlmorg 2y ago
I actually don't think it's that hard: Step 1: Most terminal emulators ship with a garbage default colour scheme. So change that. Personally I'm a fan of Solarized (specifically dark, but I like their light theme too). However even if you don't like Solarized, there are plenty of other themes that are readable with any colour against the default backgrounds. Step 2: Avoid any CLI tool that uses escape sequences for 8bit or 24bit colours by default. This might be an unpopular opinion, but I actually consider that as user hostile. Reason being: I've already chosen a the best terminal colour scheme for my readability requirements (remember, this will differ for different people). Having a developer override that because they fancy themselves as a pseudo-designer is not helpful. By all means, they can have an option to enable themes in their tool if they wish, but that should be opt-in, not the default. As someone who spends most of their life in the terminal, following those two rules is enough to provide a consistent and easy terminal reading environment with almost-zero configuration overhead. I think the real problem is that we indulge developers using 8bit and 24bit colour escape codes.
- weinzierl 2y ago
  Avoid any CLI tool that uses escape sequences for 8bit or 24bit colours by default. How difficult is this in practice? (Julia's article mentions this idea too without going deeper into the struggles) A related topic is: Do terminal color schemes only concern themselves with the 16 base colors or do they also meddle with the RGB and greyscale parts. I mean you could also adapt the 8bit and 16bit colors to your readability requirements.
  - hnlmorg 2y ago
    There is no 16bit. You cannot alter the 24bit (at least not on your average terminal emulator). Same is true for 8bit. Most terminal emulators tend not to support altering those colours either. In practice, the only application I use that I've had to configure the colours for was tmux. But I tend to forget about tmux because its one of those applications that needs a lot of a configuration from the outset anyway (in my opinion at least). There might be other "must have" tools that set the background colours too. I've either not needed them personally, or have completely forgotten about them
Arch-TK 2y ago
I have automatic light/dark mode tied to the daylight cycle on my laptop and the amount of colour emitting applications which break when I turn on light-on-dark mode is astounding. If you are writing a command line tool and you absolutely insist it must have colours then stick to the ANSI 16 colours or allow end users to customize the colour scheme.
deleted 2y ago
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powersnail 2y ago
A big problem is that, even when you ignore 256 and true color support, and limit yourself to the 16 color palette, there’s no consensus on whether the 16 colors are backgrounds or foregrounds. Some CLI write text in foreground color over color_x, while others do it with background color.
- chrismorgan 2y ago
  If you’re a CLI, you should never (a) set background colours, or (b) use more than the 16 colours range¹, unless the user configures it so. If you’re a TUI (as in, full-screen terminal app), you should probably not (a) set background colours, or (b) use more than the 16 colours range¹, unless the user configures it so. —⁂— ¹ And you can’t even wisely use most of the 16 colour range—the intense colours might be higher or lower contrast, so they’re not useful how people want to use them, and black and white could both be either the higher contrast or literally invisible, when used against the default background; and blue, yellow, bright yellow, bright cyan are each very difficult to see on some common themes, those that’s becoming less common.
  - powersnail 2y ago
    Sadly, the state of CLI and TUI tools is that background colors _will_ be encountered soon or later, if you use a wide range of software. And I struggle quite a bit sometimes to make everything in my terminal legible.
- samatman 2y ago
  I'm genuinely unsure what you mean here. In SGR, 30-37 are foreground colors, 40-47 are background, and the brights are 90-97 for foreground and 100-107 for background. Even the second bright set is quite old, xterm calls them the aixcolor because they originated in IBM's AIX in the 1980s. I've never seen terminal software which doesn't support these and definitely never encountered one where the difference between foreground and background was negotiable. The concept of a color independent of being foreground and background can't be expressed in SGR codes.
ChoHag 2y ago
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Narushia 2y ago
I've wanted to use a light theme for my terminal for a long time, but I've always given up since there are just too many programs that use custom (non-ANSI) colors that are optimized for a dark terminal background. For some of those programs, the colors are configurable, but it seemed too much of a hassle to configure every single program. So now I'm just using a dark terminal background, but with a hand-picked ANSI theme where all the colors have a sufficient contrast ratio for me and also get a pass on APCA / WCAG 3 contrast checkers. I'm happy with it. :)
- b112 2y ago
  Many terminals (konsole from trinity/tde3) allow you to customize the colour of the primary colours, which helps.
- bad_user 2y ago
  I'm not having issues with macOS's iTerm, and the programs that I use, like neovim, looked good out of the box.
- setopt 2y ago
  I was for a while faking a 16-color terminal without support for 256 colors just to avoid this configuration hell. I also tried https://no-color.org/ https://no-color.org/ because I’d rather have no colors than bad colors. These days I just gave up and manually configure most apps to use ANSI colors (e.g. fzf etc have command switches for that), and let Vim and Emacs be the only non-ANSI apps which are instead set to match the colorscheme I use in the rest of the terminal. (Although stuff like vim-dim let’s you go one step further if you want.)
- kps 2y ago
  For some of us with higher-order visual aberrations, dark mode is a non-starter. (The converse holds for some people with cataracts.) The OSC 11 control sequence lets a program determine the background color, but few bother. Usually, someone just thinks yellow warning messages look cool, and that's the end of it. That also leads to problem 12: Certain popular terminals that default to setting TERM=xterm256-color while not being xterm-compatible. Edit: I just came across `xtermcontrol`, which can abstract the background check in scripts, and is in all the major package managers.
vanous 2y ago
Glad to see someone else to use solarized light in terminal. I have this in terminal, vim, mc... custom tweaked and I love it.
Arn_Thor 2y ago
There is something deeply fondly nostalgic about looking at that ANSI color table
vishnuharidas 2y ago
Not just terminal, but be it Neon signs or LED name boards, blue is the toughest on eyes during night time. It's always blurry from a distance, and can't even focus on it. I have seen big businesses putting up huge name boards in blue lights, and I think how they can spend a lot of money without even realizing that people can't read it.
praptak 2y ago
Emacs has its not super discoverable frame-background mode[0] which is effectively either 'light' or 'dark'. When you're wondering why Emacs chose poor colors for something, it's often frame-background-mode being wrong. [0]https://doc.endlessparentheses.com/Var/frame-background-mode.html https://doc.endlessparentheses.com/Var/frame-background-mode...
- teddyh 2y ago
  Better link: <https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Faces.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Fa...>
- o11c 2y ago
  Often the underlying problem is a failure of the terminal to set the `COLORFGBG` variable. For dark-background terminals with white text: export COLORFGBG='15;0' For light-background terminals with black text: export COLORFGBG='0;15'
oefrha 2y ago
> I’m not sure why the iTerm Solarized theme is designed this way (there must be a reason!) That’s because Solarized only has 8 accent colors + 8 monotones: https://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/ https://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/ Your 16 color all-color “Solarized Light” is a derivative work based on Solarized, not the original Solarized.
Daneel_ 2y ago
I've been using a lightly customised version of the FlatUI colour scheme for around a decade and really haven't run into any situations where it's caused issues: png file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mkMESeGf7MNdKa-rPDx7Yf9BDitAQjY4/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mkMESeGf7MNdKa-rPDx7Yf9BDit... imgur link: https://imgur.com/a/flatui-7mqVZAY https://imgur.com/a/flatui-7mqVZAY Based on: https://flatuicolors.com/palette/defo https://flatuicolors.com/palette/defo
- bloopernova 2y ago
  Looks similar to the One Dark theme which was originally from the Atom editor iirc. I've been using mine for about a decade too. It works well for iTerm, vim, Emacs, vscode etc etc
prmoustache 2y ago
Problem 8: I am not really an mc user but I don't find the screenshot with the solarized theme disorienting at all. Everything is legible. You need to be the pickiest picky princess of pea to be annoyed by that.
- f_tonneau 2y ago
  (Not an mc user either.) Agreed -- and even if one were disoriented, the mc man page shows that mc colors are fully configurable -- a solution to Problem 8 not mentioned in the article.
tmtvl 2y ago
I've got my terminal set up to use a colour scheme based on Prot's Modus Operandi (https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes) theme for Emacs. I can read the output of `dmesg' and `ls /' without problems, so it's good enough for me.
- mrweasel 2y ago
  Emacs users always write the longest, most detailed documentation.
- NoGravitas 2y ago
  Do you have someplace you can share this? I'd love a pair of 16-color terminal color schemes based on Modus Operandi and Modus Vivendi.
  - tmtvl 2y ago
    The ones I'm using I have 'adapted' for QTerminal from these Konsole themes: https://www.opencode.net/sterric/konsole-modus-themes https://www.opencode.net/sterric/konsole-modus-themes And by 'adapted' I mean I just removed the Anchor, Blur, ColorRandomization, FillStyle, WallpaperFlipType, and WallpaperOpacity attributes. I don't know whether I could've just left them be, but they don't really matter anyway.
mrweasel 2y ago
And then we have the absolute mad men that just want to disable colors altogether[0]. I am tempted to try it myself, but I also like the pretty colors. [0] https://no-color.org/ https://no-color.org/
- __s 2y ago
  I'm moving in that direction. See zenbones. I ended up with https://github.com/savq/melange-nvim https://github.com/savq/melange-nvim They have a consistent color scheme concept of semantically significant color temperature, while leaning warm to save your eyes from staring at so much blue light. Comes with alacritty colorscheme
- dmd 2y ago
  These are presumably the same people 'raw dogging' trans-oceanic flights.
- chrsw 2y ago
  I'd rather see this than colorful anime backgrounds and emojis in shell prompts.
  - theideaofcoffee 2y ago
    Same. There are few things that annoy me more when working in the shell than unexpected emojis in outputs to be cute or more accessible or whatever. I'll take the occasional readline and curses shenanigans but even then there's usually a way to disable those to have pure character outputs and no control chars.
- Yasuraka 2y ago
  Color sequences are not portable and known to break things (e.g. Jupyter sessions crashing due to colored pytest reports) and nothing but a liability if you're just piping the output. I think it's more about having the option.
  - lelandfe 2y ago
    Sounds like those pieces of software should also work on being more resilient to color sequences.
k3vinw 2y ago
I use base16 shell across my terminal emulators and at least in gnome or xfce terminal I found that it helps to reverse white text on black backround when using a light theme. And flipping it back when using a dark theme. Makes me wish they had that auto contrast feature.
myworkinisgood 2y ago
I'm pretty happy with my colors 1. https://imgur.com/qCTB8bx https://imgur.com/qCTB8bx 2. https://i.imgur.com/kr3AOoX.png https://i.imgur.com/kr3AOoX.png
- theshrike79 2y ago
  The bright green on white is somehow hard to read for me
Max-q 2y ago
"bright yellow on white" and "dark blue on black": I thought the system was designed so that you should use a bright colors on a dark color or opposite, not two colors in the same group?
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  The #1 problem w/ the above article is that “color” doesn’t matter but brightness and value do.
- o11c 2y ago
  If that ever happens with a properly implemented terminal, it's an application bug. But buggy terminals are very common. Sometimes it's due to COLORFGBG not being set. Sometimes it's due to failing to implement the legacy "bold = intense" hack (from the 8-color days), which very many programs rely on. Sometimes it's due to the colorscheme having all colors be too bright. It's abominable how far some of those colorschemes are from the VGA standard. (Sometimes it's a gamma-ish problem. I can't believe it's $CURRENTYEAR and computer screens still vary so badly). --- Here's a quick test for several problems. These are bad color combinations that shouldn't be chosen, but they should be readable with just a bit of effort. Output is 2 lines, one offblack-on-black, one white-on-offwhite. printf '\e[3%d;1;4%dmThis should be (barely) readable.\e[m\n' 0 0 7 7 Results with default configuration on Debian stable: alacritty: fail (no obvious configuration) cool-retro-term: pass (despite deliberately neutering color) deepin-terminal: marginal pass (colorscheme too bright) Eterm: pass foot: fail (no obvious configuration; buggily packaged as X11 despite being Wayland-only) gnome-console (really?) = kgx: fail (configuration does not contain an obvious fix) gnome-terminal: fail (need to go into preferences and check "show bold text in bright colors") kitty: fail (no obvious configuration) konsole: half-fail (colorscheme too bright) linux: pass lxterminal: fail (check "bold is bright" in preferences) mate-terminal: pass mlterm: pass pangoterm: pass pterm: pass qterminal: pass rxvt: pass (it, along with its derivatives (I don't remember which right now, but several are probably listed here), has other unfixable bugs though, and should be avoided unless you are deliberately trying to write a program that works even with abominable terminals) sakura: fail (no obvious configuration) stterm: marginal pass (colorscheme too bright) terminator (the gnome one): fail terminology: pass termit: fail (configuration does not contain an obvious fix) tilix: pass xfce4-terminal: pass xiterm+thai: marginal fail (colorscheme contrast too low in both directions somehow) xterm: pass yakuake: half-fail (as konsole) zutty: marginal pass (colorscheme too bright) (not that this test is only for colors, not for the many other features you might expect a terminal to support)
HenryBemis 2y ago
No they are not. I've played MUDs enough years on my life to know that the best is black background, bright green letters. Prompt with white. Exits/entries with Yellow. Chats with light blue/aqua.
lsllc 2y ago
I've used Apple's Terminal for a long time, way back when there was a set of color schemes called "Terminal Fructose" that was nice, I would have different colored backgrounds for different tasks. Apple at some point built that in with their themes. However, Apple have languished with their Terminal support, they don't to >256 colors and some of the other more modern stuff is lacking and it doesn't really work with a Neovim+LazyVim setup. I've been trying to find a "better" terminal and have bounced around between iTerm2, Kitty, Alacritty and Wezterm, but while they all are more "modern", I find that none of them seem to have that basic "New Window with Profile ..." option that lets me quickly open windows with different background colors/themes (at least without some screwing around). Currently settled on Wezterm, mostly because it also works on Windows and I can share my wezterm.lua configuration (I should note that Windows Terminal is actually pretty good too). I still do find my self running Apple Terminal for quick things (e.g. using python3 as a REPL to do math or testing hex/binary stuff out etc).
- theshrike79 2y ago
  I stuck with Wezterm for two reasons: 1) I can share the config across multiple platforms easily 2) Lua for configuration. There are a few things I miss from iTerm2 (mostly mouse related), but otherwise it took me a few evenings to configure it to my liking (cmd-n opens a new window at the default dir, not the current one) and I've been a happy user since.
- p5a0u9l 2y ago
  > none of them seem to have that basic "New Window with Profile ..." iTerm has exactly that.
  - lsllc 2y ago
    Yes, you are right! iTerm2 does -- as long as you have more than the default profile set up (and you have to set them up yourself, which is easy enough).
- graemep 2y ago
  Konsole (the KDE terminal) does this (either from the manu or click and hold on the new tab icon) and I believe it is available for MacOS.
sonar_un 2y ago
Terminal colors are tricky, which is why I outsource all of my colors to more capable people. Personally, I like Catppuccin (https://github.com/catppuccin/catppuccin https://github.com/catppuccin/catppuccin)
sam0x17 2y ago
For me I've always gravitated to what is essentially the "One Dark Pro" theme originally from Atom that has been ported over to VSCode and other things, and is almost identical (in terms of terminal colors anyway) to the default theme installed by OhMyZsh. So these days I just default install OhMyZsh and I'm good to go.
sevensor 2y ago
Minimum contrast! What a great feature! One of which I was entirely unaware until just now.
theideaofcoffee 2y ago
I've reached a point where having well-coordinated colors in my terminal just doesn't concern me, I find it to be a waste of time now. I used to be all about finding the perfect scheme, with the perfect terminal font, cool transparency and whatnot, now I just don't really care. I have more interesting things to work on. Whatever, if you want to, you do you. Maybe because I've had to work on enough remote consoles without any, or limited, color support where I'm more concerned about the problem at hand than which shade of blue is being output for directories. Ok, I'll admit I adjust the default apple terminal 'pro' scheme colors a bit, adding a bit of contrast to the background because I'm in it all day, but beyond that, nothing. I find coloring has little to no positive effect on my productivity, and in some instances, hinders it. No colors on ls, I actually get a bit annoyed when color escapes reach stdout via logs now, hah. Hell, that extends even to my $PS1. I've never bothered to update it on this system. Crotchety, grizzled ops person perspective maybe?
- buggy6257 2y ago
  For me it’s about utility. I don’t buy any arguments saying don’t use aliases or colors because others won’t have them. 90% of my terminal interaction is on my terminal so I’m not too bothered. It takes me maybe 10min when I get a new computer (usually Mac) to have Oh My Zsh and Powerlevel10k installed on my machine, configure p10k with the awesome setup wizard, change to my coding font, and tweak my background and foreground to dark teal/off-white. After that I never have to touch it again and it looks amazing for the rest of my working days. The default PS1 mods from p10k giving me directory context, info on k8s, docker, and python venv, along with info on last run cmd like exit code and runtime, are all just so valuable and I got them for basically free. I can understand not wanting to constantly tweak it and I agree with that but I would have to disagree that making any customization is a waste of time.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  I don't bother about the colors because white on black is excellent for me and I prefer not to have the output colorized. Makes things easy. :) I lie a little... I do disable colorization when possible, or set everything to be white on black when I can't just turn it off.
jeffbee 2y ago
Solarized has the core of a good idea but a lot of problems in the details. I started from Selenized. https://github.com/jan-warchol/selenized/blob/master/whats-wrong-with-solarized.md https://github.com/jan-warchol/selenized/blob/master/whats-w...
esskay 2y ago
Most of this just boils down to people designing themes not understanding accessibility when it comes to color. If they followed the WCAG Color Contrast guidelines it'd be a mostly non issue.
zokier 2y ago
People in this thread complain about 8/24 bit colors, but how difficult would it be to have terminal emulator simply map 8/24 bit colors to the 16 ANSI color palette? Shouldn't that resolve most of the concerns?
- o11c 2y ago
  The 16-color palette is pretty limited so even for text that would be readable with full color, you can end up with either invisible text (black on black, for example) or really ugly and glaring (red on blue). Mapping from 24-bit color to the 256 color cube is pretty reasonable though, since the colors are close enough that you would have a hard time reading them in the first place.
tempodox 2y ago
Definitely one of the deeper rabbit holes to let yourself fall into when you feel like procrastinating. I'm content if both syntax coloring in vim and file type coloring in the shell are readable. I've got more interesting things to do.
layer8 2y ago
The approach I find most practical is: – Only use the 16 ANSI colors, with the default (or user-configurable) background. – Configure the 16 colors on your terminal client so that they are readable on your chosen background color(s).
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Yep. I used to waste so much time on tweaking colors and themes. I just go with the defaults now. I don't always like them, but screwing around with colors and fonts is just an endless no-win battle. No matter what you come up with you'll run into an app that does something nonstandard and then your carefully constructed theme looks like crap.
nubinetwork 2y ago
I learned this a few years back when switching back to KDE after being a MATE user... for some reason KDE insists on using a different palette, so it breaks some apps that use colours...
deleted 2y ago
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notorandit 2y ago
Really? I still think that white on black and green on black still work very well. At least for me in the past 40 years.
drewg123 2y ago
I just disable colors wherever I can. And curse the UEFI shell and its dark-blue-on-black whenever I'm forced to use it..
kelvie 2y ago
Looks like Konsole doesn't support this (just switched from Kitty on KDE, because on wayland, Qt apps survive a compositor restart!), but there has been a request since 2022: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=451109 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=451109 I wonder how hard this is to patch.
- diath 2y ago
  > because on wayland, Qt apps survive a compositor restart! Realistically, how often do you restart your compositor and why?
hibbelig 2y ago
I wanted to like dark mode (before it was called that, back in the nineties), and I try again from time to time, but I've never been successful. I'm also not happy with Solarized because it's so low contrast. Some programs have Github themes that seem to be okay. I tried Catppuccin but I'm not sure if I like it or not. It's better than Solarized but still pretty low contrast. Is there a color scheme I might like that's supported across multiple applications? IntelliJ, iTerm2, lazygit, neovim come to mind.
poopenfarten69 2y ago
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poopenfarten69 2y ago
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tracker1 2y ago
I used to match my terminal theme to CGA colors (DOS ANSI), the lighter colors on VGA default aren't quite the same (wikipedia screenshot). You can get the right color codes from something like Pablo or Moebius. It's a bit of a pain, and I'm honestly surprised more terminals/editors don't have a "DOS ANSI" theme option that matches those color codes. I have a reg file saved to do it for the old Windows console, but dropped windows a few years ago, and even then was using the new terminal.
anthk 2y ago
Tango color scheme. Perfect for everything.
loeg 2y ago
The base16 shell script thing is new to me, that's really neat if it works.
asdff 2y ago
I used to spend all this time choosing the colors on my terminal. Now I just use white background black text. No glare in daylight with the glossy laptop screens we all have now, and if you are working at night you can use something like f.lux to eliminate eye strain.
3np 2y ago
> problem 9: commands disabling colours when writing to a pipe An alternative to the suggested unbuffer trick is to tell your receiving programs to handle color by default (case-by-case or in .profile) LESS=-R less > LS_COLORS man dircolors(1) has more info
- joveian 2y ago
  This isn't an alternative since most programs won't send the color by default to a pipe (however, it is much better to use less -R than the article's -r so you don't get other escape codes causing trouble). The alternative to unbuffer is that most commands that use color (in my experience) recognize --color=always (or --color=never or the usual default --color=auto for no color to pipes).
eddyg 2y ago
echo SYSTEMD_COLORS=16 | sudo tee -a /etc/environment
willy_k 2y ago
An aside, but I love the Serendipity V1 (the new version not so much) VSCode theme, wondering if anyone else has used it?

371 points by chmaynard 2y ago

aragilar 2y ago

My personal rant is terminals where you cannot configure the default `TERM`.

geon 2y ago

I hate how the macos terminal "helpfully" adjusts colors. That just means I can't get my custom theme to look right.

guenthert 2y ago

'This made me wonder – if blue is colour number 5, who decides what hex color that should correspond to? The answer seems to be “there’s no standard, terminal emulators just choose colours and it’s not very consistent” ' That doesn't surprise me. What surprises me, is that there are people who apparently think that choosing a RGB value other than 0,0,0 for black would be a good idea. A lot of money is being spent to increase contrast and they are simply throwing it away (not to mention the wasted power on e.g. OLED devices).

wruza 2y ago
For many people, high-contrast text strains their eyes, leaves afterglows and blurs vision. Enjoy your issue-free vision while you’re relatively young and let us have our #ddd-on-#444 which we can read for more than two minutes.

niobe 2y ago

# see more colors from sys import argv def color(num, text): return f"\033[38;5;{num}m{text}\033[0m" i = int(argv[1]) if len(argv) > 1 else 16 for i in range(i): print(color(i, f"number {i:02}"))

m0rphling 2y ago

https://terminal.sexy https://terminal.sexy is a decent site I use for exploring and generating downloadable terminal color configs.

mildzebrataste 2y ago
I found this site recently and love it: https://terminaltinder.com/ https://terminaltinder.com/

ykonstant 2y ago

I came across all of these issues and many more trying to make a good light color scheme for my systems. Two interesting findings I did not see discussed: 1. It makes sense in retrospect, but I was very surprised at how much more subtle light themes are compared to dark when viewed on different screens; of course their hardware and software configs lead to variations on the color output, but light dominant changes are perceived so much more drastically than dark ones. This is a serious issue if you will be porting your theme to computers with a variety of screens and configurations. 2. Occasionally, you need to drop to a linux or bsd console with very limited support for fonts and fancy colors. Then your `fd` and `exa/lsd/whatever` may be unusable and annoying, especially if you have mapped the latter to `ls`. I managed, after a long struggle, to get a working fbterm in my system to get decent terminal features without X, but fbterm has its own issues. You need to account for this use-case, especially when configuring vim colorschemes: make sure that you have a fallback theme for a feature-poor console or you have really practiced typing vim commands blind :D Edit: here is a screenshot of my stylized fbterm screen, obviously not for serious work, but meant to demonstrate what you can do without X: https://i.imgur.com/RbDRgtD.png https://i.imgur.com/RbDRgtD.png

weinzierl 2y ago
Would you share how you configured your fbterm?
- ykonstant 2y ago
  Here is a pastebin of my config, adapted from Lu Xu's dotfiles [0] https://pastebin.com/RgbgLUTq https://pastebin.com/RgbgLUTq [0] https://github.com/xlucn/dotfiles https://github.com/xlucn/dotfiles It is Lu Xu's dotfiles you should focus on if you want to understand how fb* tools work. I invoke fbterm via this script to set the bg image: #!/bin/sh # fbterm-bi: a wrapper script to enable background image with fbterm # usage: fbterm-bi /path/to/image fbterm-options printf '\033[?25l' # hide cursor fbv -ciuker "$1" << EOF q EOF shift export FBTERM_BACKGROUND_IMAGE=1 exec /bin/fbterm "$@"
  - 2y ago

rcarmo 2y ago

As someone who spent an hour yesterday trying to color match WezTerm and Apple Terminal to run vim legibly, this came in very handy,

Cthulhu_ 2y ago

Would be good to check colours (if you're someone who picks colours) against the new APCA algorithm (Advanced Perception of Colour), which will supersede the existing x:y one in the upcoming WCAG 3.0 (which may take a few years yet). APCA takes font size, weight, foreground/background, and even apparently ambient light/surroundings and intended purpose into consideration. It would be neat if terminal emulators could use the device's light sensor to optimize the contrast based on environmental factors.

ykonstant 2y ago
Oh, that is fascinating.
- possibleworlds 2y ago
  The creator has a huge amount of docs surrounding the project that are quirky and very informative https://linktr.ee/Myndex https://linktr.ee/Myndex
Narushia 2y ago
I've actually done this manually for my current terminal color scheme, because I could not find a single premade theme that satisfied my personal contrast requirements for all the ANSI colors.

weinzierl 2y ago

The answer seems to be “there’s no standard, terminal emulators just choose colours and it’s not very consistent”. The colors themselves are one part of the equation, the other being the mapping to semantic elements, like GUI widgets or syntax groups. I feel there are some unwritten rules despite and beneath all the apparent inconsistency. For example keywords are almost universally somewhere in the red blue area, never green. For comments it's the opposite, most often greenish or grey. But this is all tacit and to the best if knowledge nowhere written down.

chrismorgan 2y ago
> For example keywords are almost universally somewhere in the red blue area, never green. This isn’t true. Blue’s probably most common these days, but black, orange, brown, yellow, green… they’re all pretty common, probably similarly common to red. In Pygments, the default theme even uses bold green for keywords. > For comments it's the opposite, most often greenish or grey. OK, this one’s more true. Other colours are sometimes used, but greens and greys are far and away the most common.
o11c 2y ago
> The answer seems to be “there’s no standard, terminal emulators just choose colours and it’s not very consistent”. It does seem like half this article is correctly answered by "there is a standard (VGA), but some terminals (and in particular, the Solarized colorschemes) trample all over it and break everything." Like, there are indeed a lot of buggy terminals, but Solarized will ONLY ever make things worse, since all correct programs assume something close to VGA.

hnlmorg 2y ago

I actually don't think it's that hard: Step 1: Most terminal emulators ship with a garbage default colour scheme. So change that. Personally I'm a fan of Solarized (specifically dark, but I like their light theme too). However even if you don't like Solarized, there are plenty of other themes that are readable with any colour against the default backgrounds. Step 2: Avoid any CLI tool that uses escape sequences for 8bit or 24bit colours by default. This might be an unpopular opinion, but I actually consider that as user hostile. Reason being: I've already chosen a the best terminal colour scheme for my readability requirements (remember, this will differ for different people). Having a developer override that because they fancy themselves as a pseudo-designer is not helpful. By all means, they can have an option to enable themes in their tool if they wish, but that should be opt-in, not the default. As someone who spends most of their life in the terminal, following those two rules is enough to provide a consistent and easy terminal reading environment with almost-zero configuration overhead. I think the real problem is that we indulge developers using 8bit and 24bit colour escape codes.

weinzierl 2y ago
Avoid any CLI tool that uses escape sequences for 8bit or 24bit colours by default. How difficult is this in practice? (Julia's article mentions this idea too without going deeper into the struggles) A related topic is: Do terminal color schemes only concern themselves with the 16 base colors or do they also meddle with the RGB and greyscale parts. I mean you could also adapt the 8bit and 16bit colors to your readability requirements.
- hnlmorg 2y ago
  There is no 16bit. You cannot alter the 24bit (at least not on your average terminal emulator). Same is true for 8bit. Most terminal emulators tend not to support altering those colours either. In practice, the only application I use that I've had to configure the colours for was tmux. But I tend to forget about tmux because its one of those applications that needs a lot of a configuration from the outset anyway (in my opinion at least). There might be other "must have" tools that set the background colours too. I've either not needed them personally, or have completely forgotten about them

Arch-TK 2y ago

I have automatic light/dark mode tied to the daylight cycle on my laptop and the amount of colour emitting applications which break when I turn on light-on-dark mode is astounding. If you are writing a command line tool and you absolutely insist it must have colours then stick to the ANSI 16 colours or allow end users to customize the colour scheme.

deleted 2y ago

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powersnail 2y ago

A big problem is that, even when you ignore 256 and true color support, and limit yourself to the 16 color palette, there’s no consensus on whether the 16 colors are backgrounds or foregrounds. Some CLI write text in foreground color over color_x, while others do it with background color.

chrismorgan 2y ago
If you’re a CLI, you should never (a) set background colours, or (b) use more than the 16 colours range¹, unless the user configures it so. If you’re a TUI (as in, full-screen terminal app), you should probably not (a) set background colours, or (b) use more than the 16 colours range¹, unless the user configures it so. —⁂— ¹ And you can’t even wisely use most of the 16 colour range—the intense colours might be higher or lower contrast, so they’re not useful how people want to use them, and black and white could both be either the higher contrast or literally invisible, when used against the default background; and blue, yellow, bright yellow, bright cyan are each very difficult to see on some common themes, those that’s becoming less common.
- powersnail 2y ago
  Sadly, the state of CLI and TUI tools is that background colors _will_ be encountered soon or later, if you use a wide range of software. And I struggle quite a bit sometimes to make everything in my terminal legible.
samatman 2y ago
I'm genuinely unsure what you mean here. In SGR, 30-37 are foreground colors, 40-47 are background, and the brights are 90-97 for foreground and 100-107 for background. Even the second bright set is quite old, xterm calls them the aixcolor because they originated in IBM's AIX in the 1980s. I've never seen terminal software which doesn't support these and definitely never encountered one where the difference between foreground and background was negotiable. The concept of a color independent of being foreground and background can't be expressed in SGR codes.

ChoHag 2y ago

[dead]

Narushia 2y ago

I've wanted to use a light theme for my terminal for a long time, but I've always given up since there are just too many programs that use custom (non-ANSI) colors that are optimized for a dark terminal background. For some of those programs, the colors are configurable, but it seemed too much of a hassle to configure every single program. So now I'm just using a dark terminal background, but with a hand-picked ANSI theme where all the colors have a sufficient contrast ratio for me and also get a pass on APCA / WCAG 3 contrast checkers. I'm happy with it. :)

b112 2y ago
Many terminals (konsole from trinity/tde3) allow you to customize the colour of the primary colours, which helps.
bad_user 2y ago
I'm not having issues with macOS's iTerm, and the programs that I use, like neovim, looked good out of the box.
setopt 2y ago
I was for a while faking a 16-color terminal without support for 256 colors just to avoid this configuration hell. I also tried https://no-color.org/ https://no-color.org/ because I’d rather have no colors than bad colors. These days I just gave up and manually configure most apps to use ANSI colors (e.g. fzf etc have command switches for that), and let Vim and Emacs be the only non-ANSI apps which are instead set to match the colorscheme I use in the rest of the terminal. (Although stuff like vim-dim let’s you go one step further if you want.)
kps 2y ago
For some of us with higher-order visual aberrations, dark mode is a non-starter. (The converse holds for some people with cataracts.) The OSC 11 control sequence lets a program determine the background color, but few bother. Usually, someone just thinks yellow warning messages look cool, and that's the end of it. That also leads to problem 12: Certain popular terminals that default to setting TERM=xterm256-color while not being xterm-compatible. Edit: I just came across `xtermcontrol`, which can abstract the background check in scripts, and is in all the major package managers.

vanous 2y ago

Glad to see someone else to use solarized light in terminal. I have this in terminal, vim, mc... custom tweaked and I love it.

Arn_Thor 2y ago

There is something deeply fondly nostalgic about looking at that ANSI color table

vishnuharidas 2y ago

Not just terminal, but be it Neon signs or LED name boards, blue is the toughest on eyes during night time. It's always blurry from a distance, and can't even focus on it. I have seen big businesses putting up huge name boards in blue lights, and I think how they can spend a lot of money without even realizing that people can't read it.

praptak 2y ago

Emacs has its not super discoverable frame-background mode[0] which is effectively either 'light' or 'dark'. When you're wondering why Emacs chose poor colors for something, it's often frame-background-mode being wrong. [0]https://doc.endlessparentheses.com/Var/frame-background-mode.html https://doc.endlessparentheses.com/Var/frame-background-mode...

teddyh 2y ago
Better link: <https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Faces.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Fa...>
o11c 2y ago
Often the underlying problem is a failure of the terminal to set the `COLORFGBG` variable. For dark-background terminals with white text: export COLORFGBG='15;0' For light-background terminals with black text: export COLORFGBG='0;15'

oefrha 2y ago

> I’m not sure why the iTerm Solarized theme is designed this way (there must be a reason!) That’s because Solarized only has 8 accent colors + 8 monotones: https://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/ https://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/ Your 16 color all-color “Solarized Light” is a derivative work based on Solarized, not the original Solarized.

Daneel_ 2y ago

I've been using a lightly customised version of the FlatUI colour scheme for around a decade and really haven't run into any situations where it's caused issues: png file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mkMESeGf7MNdKa-rPDx7Yf9BDitAQjY4/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mkMESeGf7MNdKa-rPDx7Yf9BDit... imgur link: https://imgur.com/a/flatui-7mqVZAY https://imgur.com/a/flatui-7mqVZAY Based on: https://flatuicolors.com/palette/defo https://flatuicolors.com/palette/defo

bloopernova 2y ago
Looks similar to the One Dark theme which was originally from the Atom editor iirc. I've been using mine for about a decade too. It works well for iTerm, vim, Emacs, vscode etc etc

prmoustache 2y ago

Problem 8: I am not really an mc user but I don't find the screenshot with the solarized theme disorienting at all. Everything is legible. You need to be the pickiest picky princess of pea to be annoyed by that.

f_tonneau 2y ago
(Not an mc user either.) Agreed -- and even if one were disoriented, the mc man page shows that mc colors are fully configurable -- a solution to Problem 8 not mentioned in the article.

tmtvl 2y ago

I've got my terminal set up to use a colour scheme based on Prot's Modus Operandi (https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes) theme for Emacs. I can read the output of `dmesg' and `ls /' without problems, so it's good enough for me.

mrweasel 2y ago
Emacs users always write the longest, most detailed documentation.
NoGravitas 2y ago
Do you have someplace you can share this? I'd love a pair of 16-color terminal color schemes based on Modus Operandi and Modus Vivendi.
- tmtvl 2y ago
  The ones I'm using I have 'adapted' for QTerminal from these Konsole themes: https://www.opencode.net/sterric/konsole-modus-themes https://www.opencode.net/sterric/konsole-modus-themes And by 'adapted' I mean I just removed the Anchor, Blur, ColorRandomization, FillStyle, WallpaperFlipType, and WallpaperOpacity attributes. I don't know whether I could've just left them be, but they don't really matter anyway.

mrweasel 2y ago

And then we have the absolute mad men that just want to disable colors altogether[0]. I am tempted to try it myself, but I also like the pretty colors. [0] https://no-color.org/ https://no-color.org/

__s 2y ago
I'm moving in that direction. See zenbones. I ended up with https://github.com/savq/melange-nvim https://github.com/savq/melange-nvim They have a consistent color scheme concept of semantically significant color temperature, while leaning warm to save your eyes from staring at so much blue light. Comes with alacritty colorscheme
dmd 2y ago
These are presumably the same people 'raw dogging' trans-oceanic flights.
chrsw 2y ago
I'd rather see this than colorful anime backgrounds and emojis in shell prompts.
- theideaofcoffee 2y ago
  Same. There are few things that annoy me more when working in the shell than unexpected emojis in outputs to be cute or more accessible or whatever. I'll take the occasional readline and curses shenanigans but even then there's usually a way to disable those to have pure character outputs and no control chars.
Yasuraka 2y ago
Color sequences are not portable and known to break things (e.g. Jupyter sessions crashing due to colored pytest reports) and nothing but a liability if you're just piping the output. I think it's more about having the option.
- lelandfe 2y ago
  Sounds like those pieces of software should also work on being more resilient to color sequences.

k3vinw 2y ago

I use base16 shell across my terminal emulators and at least in gnome or xfce terminal I found that it helps to reverse white text on black backround when using a light theme. And flipping it back when using a dark theme. Makes me wish they had that auto contrast feature.

myworkinisgood 2y ago

I'm pretty happy with my colors 1. https://imgur.com/qCTB8bx https://imgur.com/qCTB8bx 2. https://i.imgur.com/kr3AOoX.png https://i.imgur.com/kr3AOoX.png

theshrike79 2y ago
The bright green on white is somehow hard to read for me

Max-q 2y ago

"bright yellow on white" and "dark blue on black": I thought the system was designed so that you should use a bright colors on a dark color or opposite, not two colors in the same group?

PaulHoule 2y ago
The #1 problem w/ the above article is that “color” doesn’t matter but brightness and value do.
o11c 2y ago
If that ever happens with a properly implemented terminal, it's an application bug. But buggy terminals are very common. Sometimes it's due to COLORFGBG not being set. Sometimes it's due to failing to implement the legacy "bold = intense" hack (from the 8-color days), which very many programs rely on. Sometimes it's due to the colorscheme having all colors be too bright. It's abominable how far some of those colorschemes are from the VGA standard. (Sometimes it's a gamma-ish problem. I can't believe it's $CURRENTYEAR and computer screens still vary so badly). --- Here's a quick test for several problems. These are bad color combinations that shouldn't be chosen, but they should be readable with just a bit of effort. Output is 2 lines, one offblack-on-black, one white-on-offwhite. printf '\e[3%d;1;4%dmThis should be (barely) readable.\e[m\n' 0 0 7 7 Results with default configuration on Debian stable: alacritty: fail (no obvious configuration) cool-retro-term: pass (despite deliberately neutering color) deepin-terminal: marginal pass (colorscheme too bright) Eterm: pass foot: fail (no obvious configuration; buggily packaged as X11 despite being Wayland-only) gnome-console (really?) = kgx: fail (configuration does not contain an obvious fix) gnome-terminal: fail (need to go into preferences and check "show bold text in bright colors") kitty: fail (no obvious configuration) konsole: half-fail (colorscheme too bright) linux: pass lxterminal: fail (check "bold is bright" in preferences) mate-terminal: pass mlterm: pass pangoterm: pass pterm: pass qterminal: pass rxvt: pass (it, along with its derivatives (I don't remember which right now, but several are probably listed here), has other unfixable bugs though, and should be avoided unless you are deliberately trying to write a program that works even with abominable terminals) sakura: fail (no obvious configuration) stterm: marginal pass (colorscheme too bright) terminator (the gnome one): fail terminology: pass termit: fail (configuration does not contain an obvious fix) tilix: pass xfce4-terminal: pass xiterm+thai: marginal fail (colorscheme contrast too low in both directions somehow) xterm: pass yakuake: half-fail (as konsole) zutty: marginal pass (colorscheme too bright) (not that this test is only for colors, not for the many other features you might expect a terminal to support)

HenryBemis 2y ago

No they are not. I've played MUDs enough years on my life to know that the best is black background, bright green letters. Prompt with white. Exits/entries with Yellow. Chats with light blue/aqua.

lsllc 2y ago

I've used Apple's Terminal for a long time, way back when there was a set of color schemes called "Terminal Fructose" that was nice, I would have different colored backgrounds for different tasks. Apple at some point built that in with their themes. However, Apple have languished with their Terminal support, they don't to >256 colors and some of the other more modern stuff is lacking and it doesn't really work with a Neovim+LazyVim setup. I've been trying to find a "better" terminal and have bounced around between iTerm2, Kitty, Alacritty and Wezterm, but while they all are more "modern", I find that none of them seem to have that basic "New Window with Profile ..." option that lets me quickly open windows with different background colors/themes (at least without some screwing around). Currently settled on Wezterm, mostly because it also works on Windows and I can share my wezterm.lua configuration (I should note that Windows Terminal is actually pretty good too). I still do find my self running Apple Terminal for quick things (e.g. using python3 as a REPL to do math or testing hex/binary stuff out etc).

theshrike79 2y ago
I stuck with Wezterm for two reasons: 1) I can share the config across multiple platforms easily 2) Lua for configuration. There are a few things I miss from iTerm2 (mostly mouse related), but otherwise it took me a few evenings to configure it to my liking (cmd-n opens a new window at the default dir, not the current one) and I've been a happy user since.
p5a0u9l 2y ago
> none of them seem to have that basic "New Window with Profile ..." iTerm has exactly that.
- lsllc 2y ago
  Yes, you are right! iTerm2 does -- as long as you have more than the default profile set up (and you have to set them up yourself, which is easy enough).
graemep 2y ago
Konsole (the KDE terminal) does this (either from the manu or click and hold on the new tab icon) and I believe it is available for MacOS.

sonar_un 2y ago

Terminal colors are tricky, which is why I outsource all of my colors to more capable people. Personally, I like Catppuccin (https://github.com/catppuccin/catppuccin https://github.com/catppuccin/catppuccin)

sam0x17 2y ago

For me I've always gravitated to what is essentially the "One Dark Pro" theme originally from Atom that has been ported over to VSCode and other things, and is almost identical (in terms of terminal colors anyway) to the default theme installed by OhMyZsh. So these days I just default install OhMyZsh and I'm good to go.

sevensor 2y ago

Minimum contrast! What a great feature! One of which I was entirely unaware until just now.

theideaofcoffee 2y ago

I've reached a point where having well-coordinated colors in my terminal just doesn't concern me, I find it to be a waste of time now. I used to be all about finding the perfect scheme, with the perfect terminal font, cool transparency and whatnot, now I just don't really care. I have more interesting things to work on. Whatever, if you want to, you do you. Maybe because I've had to work on enough remote consoles without any, or limited, color support where I'm more concerned about the problem at hand than which shade of blue is being output for directories. Ok, I'll admit I adjust the default apple terminal 'pro' scheme colors a bit, adding a bit of contrast to the background because I'm in it all day, but beyond that, nothing. I find coloring has little to no positive effect on my productivity, and in some instances, hinders it. No colors on ls, I actually get a bit annoyed when color escapes reach stdout via logs now, hah. Hell, that extends even to my $PS1. I've never bothered to update it on this system. Crotchety, grizzled ops person perspective maybe?

buggy6257 2y ago
For me it’s about utility. I don’t buy any arguments saying don’t use aliases or colors because others won’t have them. 90% of my terminal interaction is on my terminal so I’m not too bothered. It takes me maybe 10min when I get a new computer (usually Mac) to have Oh My Zsh and Powerlevel10k installed on my machine, configure p10k with the awesome setup wizard, change to my coding font, and tweak my background and foreground to dark teal/off-white. After that I never have to touch it again and it looks amazing for the rest of my working days. The default PS1 mods from p10k giving me directory context, info on k8s, docker, and python venv, along with info on last run cmd like exit code and runtime, are all just so valuable and I got them for basically free. I can understand not wanting to constantly tweak it and I agree with that but I would have to disagree that making any customization is a waste of time.
JohnFen 2y ago
I don't bother about the colors because white on black is excellent for me and I prefer not to have the output colorized. Makes things easy. :) I lie a little... I do disable colorization when possible, or set everything to be white on black when I can't just turn it off.

jeffbee 2y ago

Solarized has the core of a good idea but a lot of problems in the details. I started from Selenized. https://github.com/jan-warchol/selenized/blob/master/whats-wrong-with-solarized.md https://github.com/jan-warchol/selenized/blob/master/whats-w...

esskay 2y ago

Most of this just boils down to people designing themes not understanding accessibility when it comes to color. If they followed the WCAG Color Contrast guidelines it'd be a mostly non issue.

zokier 2y ago

People in this thread complain about 8/24 bit colors, but how difficult would it be to have terminal emulator simply map 8/24 bit colors to the 16 ANSI color palette? Shouldn't that resolve most of the concerns?

o11c 2y ago
The 16-color palette is pretty limited so even for text that would be readable with full color, you can end up with either invisible text (black on black, for example) or really ugly and glaring (red on blue). Mapping from 24-bit color to the 256 color cube is pretty reasonable though, since the colors are close enough that you would have a hard time reading them in the first place.

tempodox 2y ago

Definitely one of the deeper rabbit holes to let yourself fall into when you feel like procrastinating. I'm content if both syntax coloring in vim and file type coloring in the shell are readable. I've got more interesting things to do.

layer8 2y ago

The approach I find most practical is: – Only use the 16 ANSI colors, with the default (or user-configurable) background. – Configure the 16 colors on your terminal client so that they are readable on your chosen background color(s).

SoftTalker 2y ago
Yep. I used to waste so much time on tweaking colors and themes. I just go with the defaults now. I don't always like them, but screwing around with colors and fonts is just an endless no-win battle. No matter what you come up with you'll run into an app that does something nonstandard and then your carefully constructed theme looks like crap.

nubinetwork 2y ago

I learned this a few years back when switching back to KDE after being a MATE user... for some reason KDE insists on using a different palette, so it breaks some apps that use colours...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

notorandit 2y ago

Really? I still think that white on black and green on black still work very well. At least for me in the past 40 years.

drewg123 2y ago

I just disable colors wherever I can. And curse the UEFI shell and its dark-blue-on-black whenever I'm forced to use it..

kelvie 2y ago

Looks like Konsole doesn't support this (just switched from Kitty on KDE, because on wayland, Qt apps survive a compositor restart!), but there has been a request since 2022: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=451109 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=451109 I wonder how hard this is to patch.

diath 2y ago
> because on wayland, Qt apps survive a compositor restart! Realistically, how often do you restart your compositor and why?

hibbelig 2y ago

I wanted to like dark mode (before it was called that, back in the nineties), and I try again from time to time, but I've never been successful. I'm also not happy with Solarized because it's so low contrast. Some programs have Github themes that seem to be okay. I tried Catppuccin but I'm not sure if I like it or not. It's better than Solarized but still pretty low contrast. Is there a color scheme I might like that's supported across multiple applications? IntelliJ, iTerm2, lazygit, neovim come to mind.

poopenfarten69 2y ago

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poopenfarten69 2y ago

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tracker1 2y ago

I used to match my terminal theme to CGA colors (DOS ANSI), the lighter colors on VGA default aren't quite the same (wikipedia screenshot). You can get the right color codes from something like Pablo or Moebius. It's a bit of a pain, and I'm honestly surprised more terminals/editors don't have a "DOS ANSI" theme option that matches those color codes. I have a reg file saved to do it for the old Windows console, but dropped windows a few years ago, and even then was using the new terminal.

anthk 2y ago

Tango color scheme. Perfect for everything.

loeg 2y ago

The base16 shell script thing is new to me, that's really neat if it works.

asdff 2y ago

I used to spend all this time choosing the colors on my terminal. Now I just use white background black text. No glare in daylight with the glossy laptop screens we all have now, and if you are working at night you can use something like f.lux to eliminate eye strain.

3np 2y ago

> problem 9: commands disabling colours when writing to a pipe An alternative to the suggested unbuffer trick is to tell your receiving programs to handle color by default (case-by-case or in .profile) LESS=-R less > LS_COLORS man dircolors(1) has more info

joveian 2y ago
This isn't an alternative since most programs won't send the color by default to a pipe (however, it is much better to use less -R than the article's -r so you don't get other escape codes causing trouble). The alternative to unbuffer is that most commands that use color (in my experience) recognize --color=always (or --color=never or the usual default --color=auto for no color to pipes).

eddyg 2y ago

echo SYSTEMD_COLORS=16 | sudo tee -a /etc/environment

willy_k 2y ago

An aside, but I love the Serendipity V1 (the new version not so much) VSCode theme, wondering if anyone else has used it?