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.
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.
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.
0-15 are, as I said, a minefield because they are user-customizable: there is no guarantee whatsoever that my user's 1 will be the same dark-ish red as mine… or that it will be dark-ish… or that it will even be vaguely red-ish. It is actually somewhat fun to design colorschemes within those crazy constraints but oh well.
On the other side of the spectrum, truecolors is a nice idea in principle but support is still spotty and inconsistent. In theory, this gives me, the designer, full control over the colors used in the UI, which is a good thing for us and for my users. In fine, if I want my colorscheme to be usable by most users, then I can't blindly rely on this.
Which leaves me with 16-255, which are more widely supported than truecolors and, more importantly, dependable. They have problems, as mentioned in the article, but their _fixed_ nature gives me confidence that the background color of the status-line, for example, will look exactly the same -- and exactly how I want it to look -- in all my user's environments. Which, again, is good for my users and for me. Losing that confidence is what worries me, here.
Like you said, maybe 146 will still be a muted violet —— just not exactly the same -- but I'm not sure about this and I think that, at the minimum, this "feature" should be put behind a checkbox/flag.
It’s been a fairly decent stop gap measure. I use tinted shell to switch between color schemes.
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?
I'm still annoyed and baffled by the fact that Ubuntu had searchable application menus 10 years ago, which were awesome and worked for just about any program, and then dropped them when they abandoned Unity. And neither KDE not Gnome thought to bring them back. In stead, many apps have since dropped application menus entirely, in favour of... some mishmash of icons and ad hoc menu buttons?
Also, even in the post-LLM era, building a decent GUI app is a lot more work than building a decent terminal app.
King-Aaron•1h ago
Damn if only there was some other system that could be operating with that in mind
worthless-trash•10m ago