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Comment by bowmessage | Hacker News Reader

Who doesn’t want color? Am I too young to understand why color would be bad!?

It's an experience thing. Color gets in the way in many cases. You need a way to turn it off. If you can't, then when you pipe it to a text file, it turns into garbage.

Worse, many programs break when you start getting fancy. If you would just stop trying to add color to your node programs, stop trying to add emojis, stop trying to control the entire terminal window, then suddenly everything would work much better. If you kick off multiple processes, you can simply console.log() instead of having to set up an RPC interface to communicate with the main process. (This actually happened.) If you stop putting emojis in your error messages, then WebStorm can highlight the stack traces automatically when you run in the debugger, enabling you to jump to the stack trace just by clicking on it. This breaks when you add emojis. (Also happened.) And if you stop adding color, then you can redirect to a file without screwing things up.

In short, stop getting fancy. :)

First thing I usually do on a new Linux system is dial down colors in “ls”. Default colors are ridicuously distacting and most don’t convey any new information. I like directories and symlinks highlighted. But the fact that a file is a .jpg or .tar.gz is sufficiently obvious from its name, without turning my terminal into a circus.

I similarly dislike the new trend of fancy command prompts. It’s a prompt, it should stay in the background.

If you're redirecting the output to a file or piping it into another program, the color just turns into annoying markup. Many programs handle this automatically but not all do.

In my opinion, any program outputing ANSI sequences without checking isatty() has a serious bug.

"I like strawberries, therefore everyone likes strawberries" is a strange way of thinking, but maybe it helps if you simply know that I don't like strawberries.

I simply find terminal programs that generate colour distracting.

Distracting from what? Are you just looking at the colors and nothing else as soon as there are any? I think colors are a great way to enhance output, as it is like a third dimension to formatting. Needless to say there might be tools that use them in silly ways, but for example having errors in red immediately can signal something bad happened.

> Distracting from what? Are you just looking at the colors and nothing else as soon as there are any?

Yes.

> I think colors are a great way to enhance output, as it is like a third dimension to formatting.

I don't. I view them as a OOB marker that causes the coloured content to effectively jump the queue into my brain.

> having errors in red immediately can signal something bad happened.

As a specific counter-example: I'm often interested in the log output that occurred right before something bad happened, so having errors in red is exactly what I don't want.

Don't know the details anymore, but the default experience on major Linuxen was to display plain files in blue color (eg. when listing files using the ls command). So that when you switched to an inverse (white-on-black) video setting from the default black-on-white, you had a hard time to read blue-on-black text for one of the most basic tasks on the command line without resorting to customize terminal colors. Don't know who came up with such a usability fail.

The fundamental problem is how terminal colors are specified. The old non-color terminals had brightness and bold. The first color terminal, setting the standard, had just 8 colors without brightness control. Put those together, and you have 16.

The result is not what you'd like. You'd really like to specify an overall scheme (light on dark, or dark on light) and then hues for each character displayed.

That'd let you see green on green just fine. It wouldn't even be possible for the foreground and background to be identical, because one would be light and one would be dark.

I suppose that switching everybody over might not be as hard as I thought at first. Considering systemd, it only takes a manager at Red Hat to force a new standard. I sure would appreciate it.

Nice to see someone mention this. Sometimes I think I am the only one. This sort of thing is what scares me away from GNU/Linux whenever I try it, having spent so many years with a BSD that does not enable anything by default. Nothing wrong with customization, except when it is someone other than the user who is fiddling with it.

I am used to a black background. Seems like the logical "default" starting point in VGA textmode. Even Linux kernel output when booting starts on a black blackground.

For my part, the most obvious irritation is that some tools assume your terminal has a black background. I run them with the default configuration and end up with the most critical bits of info in yellow-on-white text. Maddening.

(I do know the colours can be adjusted in the terminal config, and many tools have options to switch to a white background. Would be nice if the defaults worked better though.)

It can be overdone to an extreme where you really want to put it off. Examples [1] [2] [3] [4]

[1] http://images.standaloneinstaller.com/images/mirc-BZEwO8ZcLm...

[2] http://amnesiac.ircii.org/screenshots/lookgood.png

[3] http://files.customize.org/thumbnails/larger/18608.jpg

[4] https://seegras.discordia.ch/Essays/bitchx.png

As I colorblind, I don't want to deal with colors anymore. But I'm old.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/A/angry-fruit-salad.html

Unless I specifically ask for color, I don't.

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