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How to choose colors for your CLI applications (2023)

blog.xoria.org

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Re: How to choose colors for your CLI applications (2023)

#21

Post by seanwilson »

If the goal of the post is to pick terminal colors that contrast on both white/light and black/dark backgrounds, it means you're stuck with midtone colors (between light and dark). This is really limiting for color choice (there's no such thing as "dark yellow" for example), and lowers the maximum contrast you can have for text because you get the best contrast when one color is dark and the other is light.

Ideally, instead of the CLI app switching to "bright green", it would pick a "bright contrasting green". So if the terminal background was dark, it would pick bright green, and for light background it would pick a darker green. There isn't CLI app implementations for this? This is similar to how you'd implement dark mode in a web app.

Re: How to choose colors for your CLI applications (2023)

#22

Post by mrob »

BeetleB wrote: post #18
j4cobgarby wrote: post #2

Use only default (white/black), red for bad, green for good. If you need more than that, like vim or whatever, then maybe a 'fullscreen' TUI is better, with a specified background and foreground. For CLI tools, I'm not sure if I prefer more colours. The CSS to make the terminals look like iTerm was smooth, to the point I read them as screenshots.

Hard disagree on the red/green. Use whatever you think appropriate and make it user configurable.

It's a CLI app, it's already configurable. Every good terminal emulator lets you set custom palettes.

Re: How to choose colors for your CLI applications (2023)

#23

Post by red_admiral »

There's an ever more basic rule: don't just make your text white (ANSI 37m) because you assume the terminal will have a dark background. Even white-on-black (37;40m), while usually readable, can stand out the wrong way if you assume that everyone is using dark mode.

Re: How to choose colors for your CLI applications (2023)

#25

Post by red_admiral »

j4cobgarby wrote: post #2

Use only default (white/black), red for bad, green for good. If you need more than that, like vim or whatever, then maybe a 'fullscreen' TUI is better, with a specified background and foreground. For CLI tools, I'm not sure if I prefer more colours. The CSS to make the terminals look like iTerm was smooth, to the point I read them as screenshots.

Eh, LS_COLORS is sometimes useful once the meanings are in your subconscious.

Re: How to choose colors for your CLI applications (2023)

#27

Post by account42 »

red_admiral wrote: post #23

There's an ever more basic rule: don't just make your text white (ANSI 37m) because you assume the terminal will have a dark background. Even white-on-black (37;40m), while usually readable, can stand out the wrong way if you assume that everyone is using dark mode.

IMO if your terminal theme does not provide high contrast for "white" text on the default or "black" backgrounds, that's for you to fix. If you want a light terminal then change the color scheme to map "black" to a bright color and "white" to a dark color while making sure that other colors have good contrast to your "black". Don't just change the default foreground and background color and expect every single color using program to fix your mess.

Re: How to choose colors for your CLI applications (2023)

#28

Post by alt187 »

seanwilson wrote: post #21

If the goal of the post is to pick terminal colors that contrast on both white/light and black/dark backgrounds, it means you're stuck with midtone colors (between light and dark). This is really limiting for color choice (there's no such thing as "dark yellow" for example), and lowers the maximum contrast you can have for text because you get the best contrast when one color is dark and the other is light. Ideally,…

That's called `\e[0;92m`, aka the ANSI terminal espace sequence for bright green. You have 15 others, that will be displayed however the terminal's user wants. They're already available in most terminal color libraries, too.

Re: How to choose colors for your CLI applications (2023)

#29

Post by account42 »

seanwilson wrote: post #21

If the goal of the post is to pick terminal colors that contrast on both white/light and black/dark backgrounds, it means you're stuck with midtone colors (between light and dark). This is really limiting for color choice (there's no such thing as "dark yellow" for example), and lowers the maximum contrast you can have for text because you get the best contrast when one color is dark and the other is light. Ideally,…

> Ideally, instead of the CLI app switching to "bright green", it would pick a "bright contrasting green". So if the terminal background was dark, it would pick bright green, and for light background it would pick a darker green. There isn't CLI app implementations for this? This is similar to how you'd implement dark mode in a web app.

The responsibility for this lies with the color scheme not the terminal program.

Re: How to choose colors for your CLI applications (2023)

#30

Post by craftkiller »

xenophonf wrote: post #15
makapuf wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More importantly, dont use color as sole source of information. Strikethrough, emoji or ok / bad can also be used.

Emojis aren't 7-bit clean. They're hard to type. They don't mean things the same way words do. `foo | grep -i error` communicates intent better than `foo | grep :-/` or whatever goofy hieroglyph someone chose instead of, like, a word with clearly defined meaning.

> They're hard to type

I'd like to recommend rofimoji. I have it bound to a hotkey, so whenever I want to type an emoji, I just hit that hotkey and then a window pops up with my most recent emoji already visible at the top. Then I start typing in words that describe the emoji that I want like "crying" and it filters the list. Finally I select one and it pastes it into whatever text box I had selected before I hit the hotkey. My only complaint is I wish it worked for all unicode codepoints instead of just the emoji.

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