I dont like their approach in the issue of "Kitty Only uses Dark colors"[1]
* the spec said bold text and bright colours were two different attributes
* the fact that some terminals rendered the bold attribute as bright colours prevented applications from actually using bold text
* he did not want kitty to be part of the problem
furthermore, he explained that in a way that respected the person opening the bug - he didn't patronise them or say that it was his decision not to do that because he didn't care to and they could take a hike; he actually detailed his reasoning and why he was philosophically opposed to it. i might have read through that and decided that okay, kitty was not for me, but i would not have felt the author was being unreasonable about it.
There's a sea change happening here. It's a post-VGA world. Boldface means boldface.
* https://damieng.com/blog/2011/02/20/typography-in-8-bits-sys...
> whatever you are using to generate that particualr text output is incorrectly using bold formatting for bright colors
The problem is that this is pretty much every app out there. All small utils we have up to date, all colorschemes, they all are made with this in mind. And most (all?) other terminals do behave this way. This is de-facto standard. If he doesn't want this behaviour himself, that's fine, he wrote this app for himself after all. But refusing to make it configurable is just stupid and arrogant. This is not really a proposal for a new feature, this is broken compatibility with everything written in the last 30 years that uses this feature. And his response wasn't "respectful" is the slightest. If anything, the guy himself seems to be enough reason to avoid using this thing.
Ad hominem much?
He wrote the app. If you want features, fork the code and add them yourself. Name-calling and demanding that the auther implement your pet feature is ... self-obsessed.
Do you also call your neighbor stupid and arrogant for not mowing your lawn?
If a program you run in Kitty displays incorrect colors because it's hijacked bolding instead of implementing proper color support, you should absolutely go and make the issue known to the authors of said program as they are the ones who fucked up by violating the spec in the first place.
The whole point of standards is to make the relevant technologies more accessible. Developers too often break spec without regard for accessibility, all in the name of cool new features. This is bad, and it makes sense to discourage it by simply enforcing the spec.
Users are asking for a configuration option to behave the way every other terminal works, and the way everyone writing software that runs in terminals that relies on any behavior relies on terminals behaving.
For starters: Softwares that use terminfo, and anything built on top of it such as ncurses, only use this for one specific terminal type, linux-16color. No other terminal type in terminfo changes colour this way.
The idea that boldface and blink change colours has been on its way out since the 1990s. XTerm has had the ability since 1997; and while its XTerm personality does not, its UXTerm personality defaults to boldface meaning boldface. Of course AIXterm, at the start of the 1990s, had SGRs 90 to 97 and 100 to 107, and did 16 colours that way, not with boldface. The Windows Terminal issue shows some of how far this notion has extended in the more than a quarter of a century since.
It isn't a VGA world any more, and people aren't assuming VGA semantics any more. Ironically, before VGA, in the world of MDA et al., as seen from the SCO Console, people didn't assume these semantics back then, either. There has been a sea change. boldface means boldface. And blink actually means blink (or nothing, depending from what one's views on blinking as a GUI mechanism are).
Then use every other terminal, or make your own.
Just because his position does not match other folks, it does not mean he is wrong.
I don't think I respect it, and it's one of many reasons why I bounced off kitty (and certainly helps explain why I bounce off so many design decisions in Calibre), but there's still a spark of awe in seeing it happen in public.