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hnlmorgtoday at 8:39 AM4 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

mort96today at 9:22 AM

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.

show 2 replies
ffaser5gxlslltoday at 9:20 AM

> 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.

AshamedCaptaintoday at 10:43 AM

Sadly, if users start customizing the 256 color palette, developers will simply switch to true color to continue this mess further...

heliumteratoday at 12:09 PM

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.