Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Terminals should generate the 256-color palette

gist.github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 212 posts

Re: Terminals should generate the 256-color palette

#21

Post by hnlmorg »

johncoltrane wrote: post #5

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 t…

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.

Re: Terminals should generate the 256-color palette

#22

Post by OJFord »

gzread wrote: post #15
worthless-trash wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like you're saying one operating system does it better, but I fail to think of one.

Windows allows you to set any pixel to any 24-bit colour.

Not really an OS thing, you can get 24 bit 'true' colour on Linux/macOS too depending on term. Alacritty supports it, for example.

Re: Terminals should generate the 256-color palette

#23

Post by hnlmorg »

stackghost wrote: post #10

It's perennially baffling to me why we're still clinging to VT220/xterm compatible terminals. I even see people claiming they prefer working in the terminal, though it's not clear to me what type of work those people are doing. Give me a proper graphical application any day, but I recognize that it's historically been a lot more work to produce a GUI in the pre-LLM era. But golly gee whizz if we're going to keep the…

Graphical applications are great if your workflow mirrors the workflow that the GUI was designed for. However if your workflow differs then you’ll often be fighting the GUI.

Think of it like different types of programming languages. Some are more suited on different types of problems than others.

For me, my workflow is about composing and gluing different processes together rather than using a standard defined tool repeatedly in the same way as that tools UI was originally designed. So the CLI is ideally suited for me in all the areas where a GUI would be high friction.

Re: Terminals should generate the 256-color palette

#24

Post by ryan-c »

johncoltrane wrote: post #5

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 t…

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

Re: Terminals should generate the 256-color palette

#25

Post by robinsonb5 »

vanviegen wrote: post #13
stackghost wrote: post #10

It's perennially baffling to me why we're still clinging to VT220/xterm compatible terminals. I even see people claiming they prefer working in the terminal, though it's not clear to me what type of work those people are doing. Give me a proper graphical application any day, but I recognize that it's historically been a lot more work to produce a GUI in the pre-LLM era. But golly gee whizz if we're going to keep the…

GUI apps are good for discoverability. They generally are not optimized for rapid use by power users though. That's of course not an inherent limitation of GUI apps, it's just that dominant paradigms hardly seem to consider power users. I'm still annoyed and baffled by the fact that Ubuntu had searchable application menus 10 years ago, which were awesome and worked for just about any program, and then dropped them wh…

Another factor is the lack of a good cross-platform GUI toolkit (by which I mean one that (a) doesn't feel out-of-place and jarring on any platform and (b) doesn't turn a 50K app into a 1GB download.)

Between that and the level of complexity of modern GUI toolkits - and the size of their dependency trees - distribution of a GUI app is a much bigger headache than distributing a terminal app.

Re: Terminals should generate the 256-color palette

#26

Post by tezza »

stackghost wrote: post #10

It's perennially baffling to me why we're still clinging to VT220/xterm compatible terminals. I even see people claiming they prefer working in the terminal, though it's not clear to me what type of work those people are doing. Give me a proper graphical application any day, but I recognize that it's historically been a lot more work to produce a GUI in the pre-LLM era. But golly gee whizz if we're going to keep the…

Terminals are text. Text adds features missing from gui namely:

* Ad Hoc

requirements change and terminal gives ultimate empty workbench flexibility. awesome for tasks you never new you had until that moment.

* Precision

run precisely what you want, when you want it. you are not constrained by gui UX limits.

* Pipeline

cat file.txt | perl/awk/sed/jq | tee output.result

* Equal Status

everything is text so you can combine clipboard, files, netcat output, curl output and then you can transform (above) and save. whatever you like in whatever form you like, named whatever you like.

Re: Terminals should generate the 256-color palette

#27

Post by pjmlp »

This is a limitation of UNIX terminals, in other platforms not tied to a no longer existing tty interface, this isn't an issue.

Unfortunely, given that we are stuck with UNIX derived OSes, this is indeed a possible issue.

However I would argue, for fancy stuff there is the GUI right there.

Re: Terminals should generate the 256-color palette

#28

Post by hackrmn »

leni536 wrote: post #17

What I would like is HDR colors, just to access more saturated light colors. I don't want less saturated blue to make it lighter, just crank up the blue channel to 11. I still don't want brighter colors than #fff though.

I think your wish is self-contradicting. `#fff` is so-called _device_ colour -- a device like a LED-based display uses it directly to drive the LEDs, where `#fff` means that the red, the green and the blue channel are already "cranked to 11". The `f` here is equivalent to 11. HDR uses a different color format, I think -- exactly because `#fff` is otherwise either ambigous, or has to map to a different colour gamut -- where, for instance, `#fff` actually means the whitest white cranked up to 11, at however many nits (say 1500) the monitor may emit, which would make your "standard" or "SDR" white (per sRGB, say) that's usually has the emitted strength of around 100 nits, be somewhere at `#888` (I haven't taken into account the _curve_ implied here, at any rate I don't think it's going to be a linear relationship between nits and device primary N-bit colour numbers).

Also, `#fff` is ambigous -- if you mean device colour, then there's no brightness (nits) specified at all, it may be 200 or 2000 or 10,000. If sRGB is implied, as in `#fff in sRGB colour space` then the standard specifies 80 nits, so when you say you don't want brighter than that, then you can't have much of HDR since sRGB precludes HDR by definition (can't go brighter than 80 nits for the "whitepoint" aka white).

I think if you want HDR you need a different colour space entirely, which either has a different peak brightness, or one where the brightness is specified additionally to e.g. R, G and B primaries. But here my HDR knowledge is weak -- perhaps someone else may chime in. I just find colour science fascinating, sorry to go on a tangent here.

Re: Terminals should generate the 256-color palette

#29

Post by ffaser5gxlsll »

hnlmorg wrote: post #21
johncoltrane wrote: post #5

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 t…

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 othe…

> 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.

Re: Terminals should generate the 256-color palette

#30

Post by gjvc »

flomo wrote: post #18

If any end users actually cared about terminal/TUI apps, there would be modern APIs for whatever they want. Since this is really just a legacy system operator monk / retrocool interface, they spend years debating ancient DEC theology.

It's a shame to see you get downvoted (presumably because you don't cite any evidence for your assertions). As a counter-point, I will give the oft-quoted-by-me 1990s promotional video of the use of IBM CallPath on an AS/400 which should get you all misty-eyed https://youtu.be/5pY6Xxptp9A?t=2058

Enjoy.

Post reply on HN