Refreshing [LWN.net]

Refreshing

Posted Jun 10, 2021 11:26 UTC (Thu) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263)
In reply to: Refreshing by khim
Parent article: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

>Finding good colors is hard

Yes, it's hard if you try to give a color to every thing under the sun, which leads to a bad tutti-frutti overload like mcedit[1].
No, it's not that hard:
As an application developer, firstly, make colors the user's business and emit as few as possible by default. My recommendation is to do with just {default_fg, fg_hue1_shade1, fg_hue1_shade} and {default_bg}. Such reduced color sets[2] vastly facilitate the user switching between x-on-black and x-on-white and hue1-on-x and hue2-on-x to facilitate room lighting and mood.

[1] https://paste.opensuse.org/view/raw/21792273 (mcedit with 7+ colors, 11+ shades, not all pictured / background never counted)
[2] https://paste.opensuse.org/view/raw/73371546 (2c3s)

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Refreshing

Posted Jun 10, 2021 12:07 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

> Yes, it's hard if you try to give a color to every thing under the sun, which leads to a bad tutti-frutti overload like mcedit.

Surely you jest? I'm using mcedit more often than not because I like how it colors things. There are many things I don't like about mcedit (e.g. I really hate that a single long line can slow down it immensely), but colors? Mcedit is one if the best examples IMO. At least for me.

> As an application developer, firstly, make colors the user's business and emit as few as possible by default.

Nope. That's 2nd step. You have omitted extremely important 1st step: accept that you are not developing program which you would like to use in it's default configuration and create program for “someone else”. Maybe even conduct some kind of “UI research” (like GNOME guys did before they developed GNOME 3).

Unfortunately, considering the end result of GNOME3 redesign, I couldn't say that's the road to success.

And if you skip that 1st step and create something which you, personally, would like to use… is that really such an awful sin? Git was created that way, after all. And it's wildly more successful than GNOME3.

> Such reduced color sets[2] vastly facilitate the user switching between x-on-black and x-on-white and hue1-on-x and hue2-on-x to facilitate room lighting and mood.

Indeed. It makes it possible to do something which I never need or want. But why should developer value that ability higher than the ability to do what they need or want?

You somehow skipped that part entirely.

P.S. And I'm all too ready to admit that my tastes may be “wrong”. Perhaps lasting impression of Norton Commander and Turbo Pascal have left it's mark, who knows. But when I hear “color support is not hard, you just need to avoid this <link to something I like> and do this <link to something I hate>” then only reaction it may evict in me is “who died and make your god?” and/or “why should I create the program which you would like and not I would like?” People are different. Deal with this.