Refreshing [LWN.net]

Refreshing

Posted Jun 9, 2021 21:07 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Refreshing by nix
Parent article: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

> (nearly-unreadable ultra-low-contrast dark blue on black is considered a reasonable colour for file sizes, dates, and *directory names*, which should be kept more readable than anything else!

"readability" depends on your terminal colors -- if you have a light/white background (which is the "modern" default) then dark blue is a very legible color. But yellow (which is great on a dark background) is equally illegible on a light background.

So while desktop environments make it pretty easy to switch between light/dark themes, there isn't really a sane mechanism to pass that theme-derived information to terminal-based applications.

Refreshing

Posted Jun 10, 2021 14:38 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (6 responses)

> "readability" depends on your terminal colors

Of course it does, which is why any program with colour worth its salt provides at least two defaults, for light and dark background. But... exa has a dark background *on its website*, and then uses colours on it which are only suitable for a light-backgrounded terminal (and I'm not sure they're even suitable for that). It's like it's trying to make sure it's looking as bad as possible to potential new users. Weird.

Refreshing

Posted Jun 10, 2021 17:51 UTC (Thu) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (5 responses)

Oh great, an actual bikeshedding, discussion about colors. FWIW, exa example on a website looks good to me. It's readable.
I'm not sure why it's not good for you? Maybe your display isn't accurately color-corrected? Have you loaded proper ICC profile? Maybe you have a display with a strange gamma curve, like MacBook? Who knows?
Anyway, people tend to either select suitable color-set for their terminal emulators, or tweak the colors which they don't see clearly to be in better shade.
Exa is not ideal, not because of colors. For example, exa omits directory size, which is very useful information on CephFS. But I like it more than GNU “ls”, still.

Refreshing

Posted Jun 10, 2021 20:54 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (4 responses)

> Oh great, an actual bikeshedding, discussion about colors

When the colours are a stated benefit of the tool, and the choice on the website seem that bad, I think it's justified. (Also: colours really do matter, at least to people who have working vision that's good enough that they can benefit at all. Obviously the colourblind, people with tunnel vision or people who are actually blind are rightly going to think this is not a discussion that could affect them!)

> I'm not sure why it's not good for you? Maybe your display isn't accurately color-corrected? Have you loaded proper ICC profile?

Are you joking? To a first approximation nobody who isn't involved in graphic design will have done that. It takes special hardware and I don't have it (yes, it's not very expensive hardware, but it's also more or less useless unless you're a graphic designer).

Dark blue on black is almost guaranteed to be hard to read right back to the days of the oldest colour-capable DEC terminals (GNU ls's default colours make this mistake too, in case you think I'm letting it off too lightly, and portage, oh boy). Yellow on white likewise. Obviously exa lets you change these, but these seem to me to be examples of just plain bad defaults which have *always* been bad even though everyone always picks them for their new tool: but nonetheless I have no idea why anyone would think this is a good choice of colours to put on a website, unless perhaps they *are* using amazing colour-corrected Retina displays rather than the years-old random Samsungish LCDs which most people not using Macs are more likely to have. My vision is quite poor and my glasses don't make blue or red particularly good colour choices in any case, because of strong dispersion even with extremely expensive lenses -- but dispersion isn't the problem here. Can *anyone* read dark blue on black easily? (Maybe you have the brightness jacked way up? Surely not, everything else would be painfully bright.)

... hm, maybe it's just that newer LCDs have a wider colour gamut than older LCDs (which should lead to dark blue being further separated from black), and both my LCD screens *are* quite old random Samsungs. It's hard for me to say: I've hardly seen any newer LCDs... colour correction seems unlikely to fix *that*. I'd need a new set of displays, at a cost of several hundred quid, so that people with terrible colour choices can inflict a bit less pain on me :P

Hm maybe I *should* replace my monitors. Last time I looked monitors wider than 19" with VESA mount brackets were for whatever reason almost unobtainable... but that drought appears to have passed, and it was in any case years ago. Of course none of them are going to say what their colour gamut is, and shopping for monitors is a headache-inducing nightmare in any case. Argh.

Refreshing

Posted Jun 10, 2021 20:56 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

> Dark blue on black is almost guaranteed to be hard to read right back to the days of the oldest colour-capable DEC terminals

It's tolerable on PC native romfont displays, but a big part of that is that standard PC romfonts have two-pixel vertical strokes.

Refreshing

Posted Jun 11, 2021 10:53 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

> I'd need a new set of displays, at a cost of several hundred quid, so that people with terrible colour choices can inflict a bit less pain on me :P

I can save you the expense: on my Dell Ultrasharp (older model, but still well beyond sRGB) the colour choices we're complaining about here are still barely legible. And yes, it does have the correct magic bytes loaded in colord!

Maybe it's readable at 100% brightness but nobody wants to stare into a lightbulb, and this thing's old enough that getting there takes a few minutes now...

Refreshing

Posted Jun 13, 2021 20:39 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

> I can save you the expense: on my Dell Ultrasharp (older model, but still well beyond sRGB) the colour choices we're complaining about here are still barely legible. And yes, it does have the correct magic bytes loaded in colord!

Let no-one say LWN comment threads are not valuable! :)

Refreshing

Posted Jun 11, 2021 12:19 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

> Obviously the colourblind, people with tunnel vision or people who are actually blind are rightly going to think this is not a discussion that could affect them!

That's funny because I was the only guy in our class who never had any vision problems. Never needed glasses neither for reading nor for driving, passed all these medical color-tests with flying colors, etc.

> Dark blue on black is almost guaranteed to be hard to read right back to the days of the oldest colour-capable DEC terminals

What about blue on blue (like immensely popular in xUSSR Norton Commander? I still use that scheme (because it's a default in Midnight Commander) and like it.

> Can *anyone* read dark blue on black easily?

Yes. Me. Dark blue is perfectly fine. Novadays I have slight trouble reading bright yellow or bright blue on black. But dark ones are perfectly fine.

> ... hm, maybe it's just that newer LCDs have a wider colour gamut than older LCDs (which should lead to dark blue being further separated from black), and both my LCD screens *are* quite old random Samsungs.

Maybe, but that's irrelevant. I liked blue on blue back when I used ViewSonic PT810 and I like this setting now.