Refreshing [LWN.net]

Refreshing

Posted Jun 10, 2021 1:07 UTC (Thu) by kschendel (subscriber, #20465)
In reply to: Refreshing by khim
Parent article: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

After periodically fiddling with various color schemes for ls and other tools over the years, I've decided that the best color scheme is white on black - at least for me. (and I have no color deficiencies in my vision.) I find that either the colors don't really add any value, or they work sometimes and not others depending on what it is I'm interested in at the moment.

So I guess I have no objection to the (rather peculiar IMO) colors shown on the exa website as long as I can turn it all off and just see black and white.

to post comments

Refreshing

Posted Jun 10, 2021 2:00 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (3 responses)

In theory, most tools should be smart enough to completely disable color when TERM=dumb. Unfortunately, it seems that GNU ls (with --color=auto) just checks isatty and assumes that all reasonable ttys can support at least 16 colors (which is probably a fair assumption these days, but IMHO "dumb" means "no really, I can't do anything other than clearing the screen, don't try to get clever with me" rather than "just assume I'm a vt100 or whatever"). I have not tried exa.

Refreshing

Posted Jun 24, 2021 12:53 UTC (Thu) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link] (2 responses)

> but IMHO "dumb" means "no really, I can't do anything other than clearing the screen, don't try to get clever with me" rather than "just assume I'm a vt100 or whatever"). I have not tried exa.

Surely "dumb" means "I can't do anything other than printing characters - not even clearing the screen"?

Refreshing

Posted Jun 24, 2021 15:50 UTC (Thu) by james (guest, #1325) [Link] (1 responses)

AIX login assumes you can clear any screen with enough linefeeds.

Refreshing

Posted Jun 28, 2021 13:56 UTC (Mon) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link]

Sounds like a waste of paper :)