Chris's Wiki :: blog/tech/TextColoursWhyNot Commentshttps://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/TextColoursWhyNot?atomcommentsDWiki2021-09-13T23:48:55ZRecent comments in Chris's Wiki :: blog/tech/TextColoursWhyNot.By David Magda on /blog/tech/TextColoursWhyNottag:CSpace:blog/tech/TextColoursWhyNot:1b093cddd5a16c246b84e81d422575ae320b1de9David Magdahttp://www.magda.ca/<div class="wikitext"><p>I also liked reduced colour in my terminal window: just the shell prompt mostly. I find it annoying that <code>ls</code> output also tends to colourized in recent years: I prefer "<code>ls -F</code>", with object types delimited by symbols on their ends (/@*) and not colours. I have no idea what it means when some text is red, but I do know what it means when it ends with a slash (/).</p>
<p>Another pet peeve of mine: I type "<code>vi bar.conf</code>" and Vim starts up with colourized syntax highlighting.</p>
<p>If I wanted Vim I would have typed in "<code>vim</code>".</p>
</div>2021-09-13T23:48:55ZBy sapphirepaw on /blog/tech/TextColoursWhyNottag:CSpace:blog/tech/TextColoursWhyNot:3960c794b62675d7832914b4fee87b7ce75bf162sapphirepawhttps://www.sapphirepaw.org/<div class="wikitext"><p>From the designer perspective, it's troublesome to deal with color across environments. Building a terminal scheme, apps are thinking in terms of "this is green; we'll use it for 'good' status indicators," so the designer is wise to keep it in the neighborhood of both hue and luminance of the 'original' colors. Building an app-specific scheme, though, about 50% of xterm's default palette is unreadable on its white background, while they're great for (almost?) everything else.</p>
<p>Even if the app has an idea of whether the terminal is light/dark background and lets the designer react to it, <code>screen</code> terminal types can confuse it.</p>
</div>2021-09-13T13:26:54ZBy Opk on /blog/tech/TextColoursWhyNottag:CSpace:blog/tech/TextColoursWhyNot:da4c194251ef7d78fb3c6d306de09ed1fe7b6294Opk<div class="wikitext"><p>Often few colours is better than either lots or none. Configuring man to do headings in colour is worthwhile and I have just two colours configured with LS_COLORS. There are cases where it is worthwhile to make good use of the 256 colour palette in which case I recommend the tool at <a href="https://www.easyrgb.com/en/create.php">https://www.easyrgb.com/en/create.php</a> for choosing colours that complement each other well. This creates far less of a fruit salad effect than you get by only picking from the first 8 (or 16) colours.</p>
<p>Otherwise, I recently had to configure the default yellow from the basic 8-colour set to be rather darker just so it is even readable. This was precisely because of the growing trend among new utilities to use colour by default – especially with stuff written in Rust and Go for some reason.</p>
</div>2021-09-13T08:28:46ZFrom 193.219.181.242 on /blog/tech/TextColoursWhyNottag:CSpace:blog/tech/TextColoursWhyNot:17818f66ab7150cb01808a7349ee91d1b92b13caFrom 193.219.181.242<div class="wikitext"><p>Hmm, I agree about possibly not wanting many of the elaborate color schemes in apps, but I'll disagree about color in general – I do think that <em>interactive shell prompts, specifically</em>, should be if not in color then at least in some other distinct style (e.g. reverse).</p>
<p>I've noticed that no matter what program I'm using (be it Bash or the Python/Ruby/PHP REPL or LFTP or the MariaDB client or even the OpenVMS DCL), having the prompt displayed in just a single color helps <em>immensely</em> with how "friendly" the system feels (and of course with quickly finding where one command's output ends and another begins, when going through scrollback) – even if the rest of the system remains default black&white.</p>
<p>(Separately from that, I do wish that if <code>ls</code> doesn't use color then it should at least default to displaying the <code>ls -F</code> indicators for directories and other special objects...)</p>
<p>It's not the only way to do it, I suppose – with black-on-white terminals, whitespace (e.g. <code>PS1='\n\$ '</code>) would also be a good way to make the terminal contents less of a "wall of text", while color helps more on white-on-black.</p>
</div>2021-09-13T06:30:43ZBy msi on /blog/tech/TextColoursWhyNottag:CSpace:blog/tech/TextColoursWhyNot:ca6bd6bf21d9c4bc40de2fb2002debc619b88244msihttps://www.msiism.org<div class="wikitext"><p>Related: <a href="https://no-color.org/">https://no-color.org/</a></p>
</div>2021-09-13T05:47:15Z