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> Firstly it solves the age-old problem of low-contrast text, like when you `ls` a broken symlink and the red background colour is too near your current theme's
by hnlmorg 1y ago
> Firstly it solves the age-old problem of low-contrast text, like when you `ls` a broken symlink and the red background colour is too near your current theme's foreground colour.
That’s already a solved problem. You use a terminal theme that produces high contrast against all the 16 terminal colours.
Plenty of good themes exist.
The bigger problem, in my opinion, is software that uses 8 bit or 16 bit colour ANSI codes and thus overrides your terminals theme. Personally I consider this rude behaviour but I know there is a subset of HN that disagrees with me here.
- ku1ik 1y agoMy understanding is it ensures proper contrast for all cells regardless of the type of fg/bg color (palette, 8 bit, 24 bit). So if a program uses 24 bit fg color and a bg from palette (or a default one) it would still preserve the contrast. (haven’t tested, just my impression from reading the docs)
- hnlmorg 1y agoThat’s my point though. People abuse the other palettes. This is why we can’t have nice things.
- tombh 1y agoI've never actually made a palette, but it just doesn't seem practical to me to expect theme creators to always find a contrast-safe 16 colour palettes. I would imagine that it even seriously restricts the range of themes that can be made. I can imagine that such a thing is possible for smaller palettes like say 3 colours though, but then that's not actually useful for UIs. I think the fact is that small palettes come from the days of lower resources, not from efficient program design.
- hnlmorg 1y agoThere are already plenty of 16-colour palettes available. Literally thousands of them. And it takes all of about 10 seconds to search for “$TERM theme”. The problem isn’t the lack of themes. The problem is CLI/TUI developers who think their random pet project is more important than their users accessibility needs and colour preferences.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]