Comment by hnlmorg
2 days ago
> 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.
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)
That’s my point though. People abuse the other palettes.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
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.