Terminal colours are tricky

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Light vs dark themes and perception

  • Several users found light themes much more sensitive to screen differences; small changes in brightness or calibration can make them unusable across devices.
  • Others can’t tolerate dark themes (e.g., due to eye conditions or light sensitivity) and design high‑contrast dark‑on‑light schemes instead.
  • There’s disagreement over low‑contrast schemes like Solarized: some find them comfortable, others find them illegible or tiring.

Standards, TERM, and terminal capability chaos

  • Many comments note that ANSI 16 colors and VGA-ish expectations underpin lots of old and new tools.
  • Tools often ignore $TERM, terminfo, $COLORTERM, and TTY detection, emitting 256/truecolor or nonstandard escapes regardless of capability.
  • Environment variables such as NO_COLOR, COLORFGBG, SYSTEMD_COLORS, and TERM suffixes (-256color) are discussed; support is inconsistent and semantics (capability vs preference) are unclear.
  • Some blame legacy complexity; others argue modern tools are at fault for not respecting existing mechanisms.

3/4‑bit vs 8/24‑bit colors

  • One camp argues CLI/TUI apps should default to 16 ANSI colors and never hardcode 8/24‑bit palettes, so users control appearance via the terminal theme.
  • Another camp wants “good defaults” pushed onto users and sees rich color as valuable, arguing capability flags are already a kind of opt‑in.
  • Mapping 24‑bit colors down to ANSI 16 is suggested but criticized as producing either invisible or ugly combinations.

Themes, contrast, and accessibility

  • Users report issues with specific schemes: Solarized Dark’s “bright black” nearly matches the background; bright blue on black and bright yellow on white are frequent pain points.
  • Alternatives mentioned include Selenized, Modus themes, FlatUI/One Dark style schemes, Catppuccin, base16, Tango, and monochrome or near‑monochrome setups.
  • Several emphasize brightness/value and WCAG/APCA-like contrast over hue; many complain theme authors ignore accessibility.

Tool behavior and fallbacks

  • Some tools set both foreground and background, breaking carefully tuned terminal palettes.
  • Limited consoles (Linux/ BSD text console, UEFI shell) reveal how fragile color‑heavy workflows can be; people keep monochrome or simple 16‑color fallbacks, or practice “no color” modes.
  • A minority prefers disabling color entirely, citing distraction, broken logs/pipes, and portability issues; others value color for quick visual parsing.