Genuinely curious, why do some developers prefer not having colors for ls, grep, etc.? no-color.org mentions that many users prefer having colors disabled, but didn't list any reasons why.
And the color themes for the terminal are godawful. No matter how you spin 16 colors, how solarized or other, everyone is kind of chained more or less to that attrocious 16 color pallet, which is always going to be way way higher contrast or low-fi than something like a vim theme that can pick some complementary colors to work with.
Colors feel like my terminal punching me in the face. No thanks.
Also have you ever logged into ubuntu? Holy shit colors were a TERRIBLE idea.
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3717303
Funny enough, I've found that adding syntax highlighting to even normal English text makes it more readable. I sometimes turn on a random language's syntax highlighting in e.g. Notepad++ even if the choice of colouring is basically nonsense.
In the article you link, apart from the green on grey, the little example paragraph is actually very nice and readable.
Something like http://www.beelinereader.com/individual would probably make things easier for me, though it costs money.
The other issue is that it is too uniform. I like how syntax highlighting tends to make random patterns which kind of looks like pictures in the code - it makes it much easier for me to navigate, and figure out where I was and where I'm going.
This depends entirely on the content of the text. Stories, fiction, non-fiction, reference material ... information where one human is intending to communicate with another human should limit use of color.
For source code, that humans do read but is intended to be parsed and compiled by a computer, I'm not assembling (in my head) the whimsical trials of a protagonist - I need to see structure; color gives me a quicker overview of the structure of a line, function, class, etc.
Generally though, I'm not out to point fingers, it's just a fact that not all software is complete and bug-free. We're all people with limited time and we don't have the attention to detail that dealing with the maliciously compliant children that computers are takes.
What I think would be good (for me at least) is not colors, but sort of markup, like bold or underline, which is available in terminal as seen in man pages and PS1. I usually make them bold and compatible colored.
Another bonus is that I don't feel cheated when I log into systems that don't support colors (*BSD, Solaris, etc). Everything just looks normal to me. Even non-syntax highlighted vi (not vim).
If your terminal has a background very close to one of the colors on that palette, that is a theme problem, not an app problem.
So it is possible for tools to choose colours by an exact RGB value, but typically they wont.
The other thing to remember is some tools can have their colours remapped. Even tools people might not expect to be able to. eg you can configure (via environmental variables IIRC) `ls` to have specific colours for specific inode types. However in my personal opinion it is a lot of faff for very little reward.
Do you remember the days of X Modelines? I still have the nightmares.