Comment by hnlmorg

Comment by hnlmorg 3 days ago

4 replies

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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 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 3 days ago

My 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)

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  • hnlmorg 3 days ago

    That’s my point though. People abuse the other palettes.

    This is why we can’t have nice things.

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    • tombh 3 days ago

      I'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.

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