Comment by johncoltrane

5 days ago

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.

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johncoltrane

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ryandrake  5 days ago

It would be much better if application developers (and web developers, too) -only- had access to semantic color labels like TEXT, BACKGROUND, ERROR, WARNING, INFO, HIGHLIGHT, and so on, rather than red, yellow, blue, green, black.

I don’t want my applications to decide “this element must be red text on green background.” I want my applications to annotate the UI with things like “warning message” and “title.”

  • kps  5 days ago

    That could be done with a few influential terminal emulators adopting a consensus extension to ISO8613-6, like this: ESC[38:99:‹purpose›m for foreground, ESC[48:99:‹purpose›m for background.

    e.g.

        Foreground     Background    Purpose
    -----------    -----------   -------
    ESC[38:99:0m    ESC[48:99:0m   normal ( same as ESC[39m and ESC[49m )
    ESC[38:99:1m    ESC[48:99:1m   emphasise
    ESC[38:99:2m    ESC[48:99:2m   de-emphasise
    ESC[38:99:3m    ESC[48:99:3m   error
    ESC[38:99:4m    ESC[48:99:4m   warning
    ESC[38:99:5m    ESC[48:99:5m   caution
    ESC[38:99:6m    ESC[48:99:6m   notice

    Then people (themes) could easily choose foreground colour or background highlighting for particular roles. Some terminal emulators might also choose to configure other stylistic choices like bold, italic, etc.

    (I believe ISO8613-6 defines sub-modes 0 through 5 (te;db), with 2 (rgb) and 5 (256-color indexed) being most widely implemented. But some terminals historically mess up : and ; in CSI sequences, and I know at least one would interpret ESC[38:6:1m as ESC[6;1m (blinking bold!), so here I pick 99 (ECMA-48 defines modes up to 65).)

    • hnlmorg  5 days ago

      This is a fantastic idea!

      I’m working on a terminal emulator. It’s not big like Ghostty but this is something I might adopt

      1 reply →

    • zzo38computer  5 days ago

      I like this idea, although I think that they should be only one code, which might program both the foreground and background (and font styles if applicable), rather than separate codes for foreground and for background.

      2 replies →

makapuf  5 days ago

My proposal would be to define a set of intents for 0-15 with sensible defaults and let terminal themes assign any color they would like to those. 0 would be background, 7 for foreground , 1 for highlight, 3 for titles, 4 for frames and from there work on backgrounds also..

tambourine_man  5 days ago

Can you link to your Vim colorschemes? I have a light and a dark one that I hacked over the years but I'm always looking for new ones.