I know 16 colours is limiting, but one of my biggest pet peeves is CLI / TUI developers creating their own custom themes using colours outside of that because odds are, they’re going to generate a colour scheme that is harder to read for a lot of people with visual impairments, people who prefer a white or coloured background for eye comfort, people are dyslexic and find non-black backgrounds easier to read, and others with visual difficulties, reading difficulties, or those who just like a different colour scheme per project or environment they’re working in so they can multitask more easily.
And the developers answer to this loss of control is to create multiple colour schemes and allow the user to configure the app. Which then means their users have to set up their terminal defaults and then configure every fscking app that ignores those terminal defaults(!!!) instead of defining their required colour schemes once in the terminal.
People use the terminal not because it’s pretty but because they find a text interface more efficient. If you want to make pretty things then build a web frontend. But please do not break my terminal because you feel the need to impose on me your own favourite colours of the hour.
I agree. I always customize the blue color on my terminal because dark blue on black is completely unreadable to me (and I'm not even color blind!). For some reason, every single terminal emulator defaults to a blue that's unreadable on a black background (I think typically #00f).
If a tool overrides my color settings, it too usually picks a dark blue that's unreadable on my black background.
Most of them are emulating the EGA/VGA palette which was a regression from the CGA terminal colors.
https://int10h.org/blog/2022/06/ibm-5153-color-true-cga-pale...
Not really, because the dark yellow (not brown) is used... it's similar, but not the same in most terminals... brown as dark yellow for cga was a kind of short to a different color mix than the natural position which most terminals now use... actual screen effectiveness/brightness is different as well.
Kind of anal about this since I started with a lot of CGA and EGA displays when I was in my late teens and early 20s and relatively involved in the ANSi art scene.
Here's a related project I'm working on for playing doors in a web browser.
https://github.com/bbs-land/webterm-dos-ansi
I have no idea if this was the reason behind turning the dark yellow into brown, but the brown was a much better looking color for DOS games so it was a good call
They could also have done something about the two magentas though... E.g. made one of them orange?
The light red usually appeared somewhat orangy/peachy, it's generally used as flesh for ansi artworks.
ex: https://16colo.rs/pack/ice-200207a/ti-war.ice
I think it was just determined that brown would be more useful than the darker yellow in practice. Other xterm colors are also a bit off from CGA/EGA/VGA DOS colors.
Is there a human that can read that dark blue on black or is it just us who has their eyes wired differently?
I have to select that text to change the background to read it.
No one can and people have been complaining about it for decades.
But there is no standard or standard body anywhere for terminal colors so there is no obvious way to improve this situation.
And no urgency either, because all terminal emulators allow users to customize the palette anyway.
If I was the maintainer of a terminal emulator, I would see a quite obvious way to improve the situation for my users: change the default colors so that dark blue is brighter.
There's no obvious way to unilaterally improve the situation across the whole ecosystem, that's true. But I don't understand why individual terminal emulator maintainers don't fix it for their users.
Because it means making choices, breaking assumptions, etc.. They have made it user-customizable so they don't have to go through all that.
FWIW, the current de-facto standard is set by xterm. Here is a relevant excerpt of its source code:
Make that what you will :-).Running a software project means making choices. Currently, the choice is made to make blue text unreadable. That's not a great choice, in my opinion.
> the current de-facto standard is set by xterm.
That’s true for 256 colour and various other escape codes too. But I wouldn’t say it’s true for 16 colour pallet.
Quite a few terminal emulators do this already. Including the one I maintain.
There are fewer blue cones in the fovea centralis than there are in the surrounding parts of the macula, so humans can't resolve details as well in blue light.
Which is why people who understand color tend to add a bit of green in to make a color which still looks deep blue but is much brighter than what #00f looks like
And I filed a PR because an author used yellow and hadn’t assigned orange to any purpose, which is actually legible on a white terminal where yellow never is.
Not just me then? My "dark blue" is always a kind of pale washed-out-bluey-grey because of that.
> but one of my biggest pet peeves is CLI / TUI developers creating their own custom themes
An even bigger one is hardcoding black and white instead of using foreground/background and use reverse when needed.
If I make a terminal emulator, I would probably not support true colours in text but only in pictures (and it would be possible to disable pictures). I probably would not implement 256-colours either, because I agree with you; the user configures their own colours to use, and the terminal should use them. For text, only sixteen colours can be used.
Similarly, the user can also set their own fonts for the terminal, just as you can with colours and other functions. (However, some programs will have a reason to configure the fonts and palettes for the specific use, although most won't and even if they do the user might disable those features.)
A program can have an option (possibly by environment variable) to disable colours entirely; this might be necessary even if you can disable colours in the terminal emulator, because a program might want to use such things as reverse video, underlined text, etc to indicate some things when colours are disabled. (Disabled colours can also be useful if you do not have a colour display or if you want to print out a screenshot without a colour printer.)
Sadly, if users start customizing the 256 color palette, developers will simply switch to true color to continue this mess further...
gdb (the debugger) sometimes prints dark blue text on a black background, which is unreadable. I customize the dark blue color when possible in VTE's due to this, but it's not always possible everywhere
But I wonder what the developers of gdb were using that made them not notice this
yes, this. the reason i use wolf (firefox fork) is because i can easily disallow styles overriding, font overriding, and use bitmap fonts. nothing else.
now that react devs finished destroying the web they have to impose their superior taste into terminal through 800mbs TUIs.