3 ms·

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 eq

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.