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Terminals should generate the 256-color palette

https://gist.github.com/jake-stewart/0a8ea46159a7da2c808e5be2177e1783
41•tosh•1h ago

Comments

King-Aaron•1h ago
> Complex and color-heavy programs struggle with such a small palette.

Damn if only there was some other system that could be operating with that in mind

jimrandomh•1h ago
Yeah, when you point it out, this makes complete sense and every terminal should probably add this feature. I think I would generalize this to 24-bit color as well; 16 colors isn't enough to identify a unique tonemap, but if you fiddle with the parameters a bit I think it shouldn't be too hard to come up with something hacky that works.

Although, this should probably be optional (both as an option for terminals to have in their own settings, and via an escape sequence that opts out), because some users will have configured some programs with a color scheme that they don't want transformed. For example, if your terminal uses the Solarized color scheme, and your text editor _also_ uses the Solarized color scheme, then this could lead to double-applyig a color transform and getting something odd.

aragilar•40m ago
This definitely seems like a sensible starting option to generate 256 colours from a custom set of 8 (and then let the really pedantic users fiddle with the extended set). I would presume for "standard" themes these values would be pregenerated and adjusted slightly if needed.
johncoltrane•37m ago
The good thing with the 256c palette is that colors in the 16-255 range are fixed, which gives us a very high level of confidence that 146 will be a muted violet and so on. This is very useful for colorscheme developers because it allows us to provide a pretty good and consistent experience across the widest range of terminal emulators.

If the 256c palette is generated from a -- potentially wild -- 16c palette then there is no guarantee anymore that 146 will indeed be the 146 I expect.

Turning 16-255 into the same kind of minefield as 0-15 seems very misguided to me.

jauntywundrkind•22m ago
This will be fascinating to see in practice, with ghostty for example shipping these changes! I expect that the concern you have here will largely be for naught, with some exception. What are some terminal apps you think might be affected, what are test cases?

I didn't read in fully, but what I was thinking in my head is not that we would just totally replace the rest of the colors with arbitrary palette. But that we would sub in better versions of the palette that also used user colors as the base. What was magenta is derived from what the user picked from blue and red.

There's always been such tension between design/creative and users. Apps & designers want their own brand identity, want creative control to make things just so. And are willing to throw user preference & desire on the pyre to get that exacting control. Personally that was always rubbed me extremely the wrong way; I would way rather allow some weirdness & funkiness in, if it leaves the user in control. But I understand the risk aversion, understand the Murphy's law corporatism that makes people and companies want to build strong laws that forbid anything but strictly approved systems, for fear that things go wrong. I understand. But I also things that's a dogshit world to live in.

dwb•37m ago
Agree, and I love how concise, yet persuasive and practical this proposal is.
k3vinw•19m ago
It’s a messy situation for sure and what lead me to discover tinted theming: https://github.com/tinted-theming/base24/

It’s been a fairly decent stop gap measure. I use tinted shell to switch between color schemes.

stackghost•10m ago
It's perennially baffling to me why we're still clinging to VT220/xterm compatible terminals. I even see people claiming they prefer working in the terminal, though it's not clear to me what type of work those people are doing.

Give me a proper graphical application any day, but I recognize that it's historically been a lot more work to produce a GUI in the pre-LLM era.

But golly gee whizz if we're going to keep the command line around, can we move on from 1983?

consp•2m ago
Why? There is huge compatibility layer build on top of this and changing even these minor things will break stuff in places you do not expect. Want a fancy terminal? Install another one. By default most allow changing to many terminal formats. Break things to move forward is fun when it's not your problem to solve down the line.

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