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Showing posts from May, 2019

Designing a better terminal text color experience

Hello, it is 2019. We've been computing together for over 50 years. And then there's this: Text in the ANSI 16 color palette that, for some strange reason, is a thing that still exists. Okay, I get it. Most of us who use the terminal (aka console, Command Prompt, whatever you prefer to call it) are down to earth, get the job done software developers and system administrators and not graphics design artists. But isn't that just a teesy, tiny bit painful to look at? And isn't this almost 2020? Many of the text bits are quite unreadable - the black text on black background in the above image is especially invisible. And the colors you can see for the most part just yell, "I'm a color! Look at me for an extended period of time and get a free headache!" Sure, each and every user can usually change default colors to something else but these are the default colors. Actually, it is worse than that, excluding the usually but not always configurable