[johncoltrane]

The good thing with the 256c palette is that colors in the 16-255 range are fixed, which gives us a very high level of confidence that 146 will be a muted violet and so on. This is very useful for colorscheme developers because it allows us to provide a pretty good and consistent experience across the widest range of terminal emulators.

If the 256c palette is generated from a -- potentially wild -- 16c palette then there is no guarantee anymore that 146 will indeed be the 146 I expect.

Turning 16-255 into the same kind of minefield as 0-15 seems very misguided to me.

[hnlmorg]

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.

[mort96]

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.

[ffaser5gxlsll]

> 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.

[zzo38computer]

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.)

[AshamedCaptain]

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

[Aardwolf]

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

[heliumtera]

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.

[donatj]

> provide a [...] consistent experience

Please just don't. This is not the web.

Color usage in the terminal should be largely semantic, not stylistic.

Speaking for the group of people I know and work with, we don't want a "consistent experience" and hate TUIs that try to manhandle the color palette. Use color sparingly and with intention. Respect that different people have different settings.

[johncoltrane]

First, I make third-party Vim colorschemes, not app. People install my colorschemes because they like the colors, not because I'm a monster with a gun pointed at their face. No one is harmed. No one is forced to do anything they don't want.

Outside of my text editor, where colors matter a lot to me for syntax highlighting, I'm definitely in the NO_COLORS camp (and in the NO_EMOJI camp, nowadays).

> Color usage in the terminal should be largely semantic, not stylistic.

I wholeheartedly agree but 0-15 sadly have zero inherent semantics, which is the single reason behind every terminal colors-related drama since forever: developer choses 9 to highlight an error message because it is generally a bright red by default --> user sets 9 to whatever makes sense to them --> error message is illegible.

[pjmlp]

I thought we had left TUIs behind in the 90's, instead it is rainbowns, unicorns, and whatever else going with those stylisic experiences.

[ryandrake]

Yes, and giving developers control over colors, text size, typeface and so on has also been a usability and accessibility disaster on the web, too! The user should have this control.

[tasuki]

> which gives us a very high level of confidence that 146 will be a muted violet

Is there anything you can do with that information though? This piece of information only becomes useful if you know what colour the background is. And you should also know the colour of text and everything else.

What if the background is muted violet? What if the background is white and the foreground is muted violet? I don't want you to ever use "muted violet" in my terminal, since you have no idea what colours there are in my terminal.

[johncoltrane]

I make Vim colorschemes so I'm fully in control of all those aspects. If I decide I want a given token in muted violet it is because I know that it will works well with the background… that I have defined myself.

The exact values of your 0-15 don't matter to me and they don't matter to you either, because you chose to use my 256c colorscheme to begin with.

[lucideer]

> This is very useful for colorscheme developers

I would posit then that this article simply doesn't apply to you at all. The feature being described is targetted at users who are effectively developing their own schemes (albeit in a rather simplified automated manner). If I'm taking something off the shelf, I'm using the appropriate recommended base16. I have no expectation that a wild base16 is going to align with any 3rd-party's curated scheme.

I do understand that this logic isn't always going to click with people given the differing contexts of a terminal-wide -vs- app-specific (i.e. vim) approach, but again: that disparity seems either a legacy issue (caused by things like this 16-256 mis-alignment) OR simply a philosophical difference (whereby people who customise at the term level shouldn't at the app level & vice-versa).

[jauntywundrkind]

This will be fascinating to see in practice, with ghostty for example shipping these changes! I expect that the concern you have here will largely be for naught, with some exception. What are some terminal apps you think might be affected, what are test cases?

I didn't read in fully, but what I was thinking in my head is not that we would just totally replace the rest of the colors with arbitrary palette. But that we would sub in better versions of the palette that also used user colors as the base. What was magenta is derived from what the user picked from blue and red.

There's always been such tension between design/creative and users. Apps & designers want their own brand identity, want creative control to make things just so. And are willing to throw user preference & desire on the pyre to get that exacting control. Personally that was always rubbed me extremely the wrong way; I would way rather allow some weirdness & funkiness in, if it leaves the user in control. But I understand the risk aversion, understand the Murphy's law corporatism that makes people and companies want to build strong laws that forbid anything but strictly approved systems, for fear that things go wrong. I understand. But I also things that's a dogshit world to live in.

[johncoltrane]

I have a bunch of Vim colorschemes under my belt.

0-15 are, as I said, a minefield because they are user-customizable: there is no guarantee whatsoever that my user's 1 will be the same dark-ish red as mine… or that it will be dark-ish… or that it will even be vaguely red-ish. It is actually somewhat fun to design colorschemes within those crazy constraints but oh well.

On the other side of the spectrum, truecolors is a nice idea in principle but support is still spotty and inconsistent. In theory, this gives me, the designer, full control over the colors used in the UI, which is a good thing for us and for my users. In fine, if I want my colorscheme to be usable by most users, then I can't blindly rely on this.

Which leaves me with 16-255, which are more widely supported than truecolors and, more importantly, dependable. They have problems, as mentioned in the article, but their _fixed_ nature gives me confidence that the background color of the status-line, for example, will look exactly the same -- and exactly how I want it to look -- in all my user's environments. Which, again, is good for my users and for me. Losing that confidence is what worries me, here.

Like you said, maybe 146 will still be a muted violet —— just not exactly the same -- but I'm not sure about this and I think that, at the minimum, this "feature" should be put behind a checkbox/flag.

[duskdozer]

>Apps & designers want their own brand identity

This is the main issue as I see it. Obviously I'd prefer to need to customize less, but as long as I have the option to override the defaults, I don't care much about what those defaults are. But the concept of "branding" flies right in the face of this.

[lloeki]

Terminals like iTerm2 have had a Minimum Contrast for a while that messes with (foreground) colours, sometimes very badly.

[shimman]

For far too long I'm ashamed to admit, I would use vim with the adventure time theme on iterm2. Looking at it now I'm shocked my eyes didn't bleed more. I think the worst part was that visual mode was neon yellow bold text with neon pink bg. Relying on visual mode quite a bit while using vim I was self inoculating my subconscious with stills of a poor Jackson Pollock imitator while on multiple different amphetamines. Hopefully I find out my resistance soon.

[tambourine_man]

I think it's an interesting idea, but should be set as an option and default to off, for the reason you describe.

If the user sets a sensible 16 color palette though, many old utils could look great out of the box. I'm enticed by the idea.

[Gormo]

> and consistent experience across the widest range of terminal emulators.

Instead of aiming to provide a "consistent experience", you should instead prioritize providing consistent functionality, while avoiding impeding users' control over their own particular experience.

[johncoltrane]

No, because I don't develop programs. I make third-party Vim colorschemes that users install because they like the colors. There is no impending happening, here.

[ryan-c]

There are escape codes that can re-define palette entries. Usually including the 16-255 range.

[johncoltrane]

Yes, I know that (see the venerable https://github.com/trapd00r/colorcoke, etc.) but those tricks are not used widely enough for them to be a concern. Using those tricks is also a deliberate choice so it is definitely on the user if my lovingly crafted 256c colorscheme is broken.

Having all terminal emulators run the equivalent of colorcoke without asking the user is not a very bright idea.

[vova_hn2]

I'm sorry, but I find this mentality from app developers extremely annoying.

I personally prefer light themes everywhere, both in IDEs and in the terminal. I thought that just choosing my own color scheme for 0-15 would give me the color pallette that I prefer, but because app developers like you for some reason decided that you know better what colors do I prefer, this is actually not enough. I also have to configure each TUI application separately to have the color scheme that I like.

And I do not understand why people do it. Like, why would you deliberately break the universal customization system and force users to use your own, specific to your app?

Honesty, each time I encounter an app that uses 16-255 colors, I feel like someone just violated my personal space and intruded into my chosen color pallette with their own colors that don't fit.

[johncoltrane]

I'm not an app developper. I make third-party colorschemes for Vim, which I assume are downloaded, installed, and used by people on their own volition, after they have looked at, and liked, the screenshots. Moreover, I take great care to make sure they are still usable in 16c, within reason.

Because all my work is based on 16-255, I can actually guarantee to my users that, given a properly configured terminal emulator, they will get the colors on the screenshots.

If I can't rely on 16-255 to be fixed anymore, then I won't be able to make any promise anymore. In practice, it just means adding a caveat in the README.md, but I'd prefer not to. Here's hoping this breaking change gets hidden behind a checkbox/flag.

[eddyg]

+1

We use an ansible task to ensure SYSTEMD_COLORS=16 is in /etc/environment on every system and it at least solves that problem...