Re: colorls in base

[David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Sun, Feb 17, 2019 at 01:24:09PM -0600, Jonathan A. Kollasch wrote:
 > > Can we, however, please have colors that are not angry fruit salad? My
 > > understanding is that sufficiently recent xterm and terminfo is
 > > capable of handling arbitrary rgb colors, so there's therefore no need
 > > to make everyone's eyes fall out.
 > 
 > That's more a palette issue... ANSI gives us 8 colors (16 if you think
 > that "bold" should indicate another color rather than heavier weight
 > text).  It's difficult to get a combination of
 > black/red/green/yellow/blue/magenta/white to not look like angry fruit
 > salad, unless you significantly diverge from the generally accepted look
 > for those color names.

And you can't diverge from them at all using just the traditional
MSDOS-era color escape codes.

That's the point. Using tty colors is, inherently, repulsively ugly. I
am asking that we not perpetuate this aesthetic crime and, if we're
going to deploy this feature, do it in a way that doesn't
automatically make people's eyes fall out.

(And before anyone says "it adds information! whether it's ugly is
irrelevant" -- being that ugly detracts significantly or fatally from
the ability to interpret the information.)

 > If you want to advance to the 256 color with
 > 6x6x6 color cube, or 24-bit color modes, you may quickly take this
 > thread into literal 'what color should we paint it' bike shedding.

Yes, so someone with graphic design sense needs to put together a
scheme, or steal one off the internet.

 > > Better still would be a scheme that can adjust to the existing text
 > > and background color of the terminal, but that's probably still hard.
 > 
 > While an interesting idea, that sounds like a solution waiting for a
 > problem to me.

Why? Does every terminal window out there have the same background
color?

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost