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Design, edit and share custom terminal color schemes

by rohan1024 on 9/10/20, 10:56 AM with 35 comments

  • by hnlmorg on 9/10/20, 11:40 AM

    A note to any developers writing console applications, please please please don't use RGB values in your terminal colour -- only use the 8 base colours plus highlight. RGB values prevent your users terminal from using the custom colour palettes your users might define (and like this site helps you to create). Aside from being a little annoying, it can cause genuine usability problems for some groups of people who use custom palettes:

    - for visual impairment reasons (eg high contrast colours)

    - or to differentiate different servers (eg different background colours for dev or prod servers)

    - or have less contrasting colours to reduce eye strain (eg the Solarized colour schemes)

    - might suffer from colour blindness so pick colours that contrast better with their condition

    - or even just those that prefer a white or other non-black backgrounds for readability reasons (eg they might be dyslexic and find a non-black background or different shades of text easier to read).

    I do fall into two of those categories and run into this issue a lot since there is a trend these days for developers to hard code colour values into their applications.

    Equally, some developers use the "you can select a custom colour map - I just define a pretty default" argument and while that's slightly better, the best option would be still to default to the standard 8 colours (or the default unformatted text) and let users opt into RGB values if they wish. This will save your users from constantly having to define the same colour palettes in every application.

  • by gregsadetsky on 9/10/20, 7:56 PM

    Congrats! Very small note: when changing any of the colors, the URL changes presumably to reflect the new state.

    The issue is that these "stateful" URLs don't work when accessed directly. Try this one that I got by fiddling with the colors a bit:

    https://terminal.sexy/#HR8hxcjGKCoupUJCjJRA3pNfX4GdhWePXo2Hc...

    The site hangs and does not initialize.

    Cheers

    (I just emailed the site's author about it being discussed here as well)

  • by megous on 9/10/20, 4:50 PM

    You can also do this for Linux kernel console, if you implement export for vt.default_{red,grn,blu} kernel command line parameters.

    https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/latest/source/Documentation...

    That would be very useful :)

    Or this:

    https://github.com/EvanPurkhiser/linux-vt-setcolors

  • by shiftpgdn on 9/10/20, 3:52 PM

    Vaguely off topic but has anyone encountered a person using the "grass" or "ocean" OSX terminal themes in the wild? Why are they even there?

  • by jaquers on 9/10/20, 4:16 PM

    Really well done application with tons of export / import formats, lots of presets and the palette is integrated into the UI - delightful.

    Thanks for the submission.