Comment by cb321

AFAICT, this "number of pixels" (as well as the outside-the-cell pixels) effect is one of those "obvious as heck if you experiment on yourself with barely any science or even just contemplate it" things that somehow winds up ignored in standards. I'd love to be wrong, though.

The screenshotting is surely more portable.

I was not saying LC_* are a source of color values, though a terminal could surely do that as a way to export this data to its first shell without the clunky stdin/out protocols for OSC4. For example, I believe one variant of rxvt/urxvt used to export COLORFGBG. I would even say (LC_FG LC_BG LC_COLOR0..15 LC_CURSOR, etc) is an ok idea. One downside is a user could change the values since environment variables are very much not "read only", but that is sort of "on them" for fooling subprocesses "on purpose".

I was mostly lamenting that ssh server configs are moving toward making it hard(er) to "pass through" this kind of environment variable-driven setup. Something people often overlook in this general problem space is making whatever protocol they come up with also "work through to shells beyond one (or more) ssh hops". So, the LC_COLOR<N> idea would have been "more fabulous" 5..10 years ago when I would have anticipated "this will usually work". Maybe it could still be easier for some than OSC4.

Anyway, big topic with half century of history and hard to be brief.