Take a look at this guy that got verbal abuse for pointing out the color labeled "green" looks more like banana than lime:
https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/1561
Strike 2/2 was multiple devs responding to OSX issues with "switch operating systems"
And please note that Mac OS is NOTORIOUS for having bad/buggy/outdated support for OpenGL (which alacritty extensively uses), and this is a legitimate frustration that many developers in the low-level graphics domain have. It’s already really maddening for the devs, the contributors shouldn’t nag too much about it (I understand people outside the domain might genuinely not know this - but it’s always good to read some of the previous Github issues before filing your own, to learn the general “vive” among the core contributors)
No it wasn't. It was bad.
Granted, the original bug report could have been a bit clearer, but the reporter was more than happy to help out and promptly responded to the questions and even some checking of the RGB of the colour in question, and then offered to open up a new related issue. But the dev in this case took the worse interpretation of the reporter's intent and claimed they were rude, or disrespectful or whatever, and took their report as an attack on their choice of default palette. I can imagine that the reporter was surprised and puzzled to be called "entitled" here.
Sounds a little bit entitled to me..
And FWIW, that website they're all referencing absolutely will not say a color contains mostly "yellow" (it reports the highest RGB value), no matter what you do [1].
I went and looked at the issue, and the title is not "colors are wrong" but it is "Colors don't look as they should". Interesting how everyone comes away with what they this was said. Says a lot about the dev who responded, really.
This says a lot about me, but I empathize with that. That the reason I strive to be perfect in everything is that I feel like I'm under attack. Illogically, because I was, as a child, continually insulted.
It's a shitty way of living, trust me. But I get it.
https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty#installation
Labeling a piece of software as "cross platform" without testing on all platforms comes across as dishonest.
It's totally fine to have a policy of not supporting OSX, as long as you communicate it with professionalism or at least civility.
I used Kitty for a while instead, which is very similar. More recently I've been trying out Foot: https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot
Basically every other "simple" terminal I've found behaves better -- xterm, urxvt, konsole, even iTerm2.
I have no idea how they can claim "fastest".
> Benchmarks so far have just involved running find /usr on my Linux system with Alacritty, st, and urxvt, and on macOS against Terminal.app and iTerm2.
https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/289#issuecomme...
They decided to continue marketing it as the fastest terminal emulator anyway.
> > Correct accuracy of first sentence in README #798
> >
> > As documented in #289 it's not currently the fastest-- only a small number of terminals running a single task for initially benchmarked.
>
> nah
To be clear, we’re talking about Kovid here, right?
Can we assume people are acting in good faith until we have reason to think otherwise? As highlighted by the green-is-yellow issue, it is OK to simply say, "Understood. The color scheme has been previously discussed, is popular and isn't currently considered for change. But you can configure it yourself by <link-to-documentation>..." The accusation of an entitled attitude appears a bit of a leap to me too. To be fair, while a tad rude in tone, the dev's second post is an improvement.
Or perhaps, "We don't have a lot of resources for this level of detail. Sorry." (Open-source honesty?) Or even, "If you wrote a patch taking the values from rxvt it would be considered but possibly rejected after discussing policy with lead devs."
The two first comments of the maintainer in the thread mentioned the configurability of alacritty, giving soft hints that maybe the user should just set it privately to comfort their private taste. I feel that discussions about taste choices can sometimes be the most tiring ones, because often people have different tastes and you can't give rational arguments why you like one taste more. That's why there is configurability in the first place, maintainers recognizing that people have a diversity of personal tastes. You can't ever do it right by everyone. Maybe the maintainer should have communicated that better more early on, but they did communicate something along those lines later on. They were still around to explain themselves.
What are the devs supposed to do? Debug the proprietary driver? They might not even own a Mac device because they give the software away for free and don't want to spend thousands on their spare time hobby. OpenGL drivers, regardless of manufactuer btw, have massive issues with bugs. They were so serious in fact, that the original glium maintainer gave up maintaining it. Having taken over emergency maintainership of glium, the way I deal with such issues now is to close them with a response that PRs are welcome (unless my specific config can reproduce them).
Also, extremely often you see open source as well as proprietary software on hn that's mac only. Isn't that, too, maintainers saying "switch operating systems"?
As you said, "The maintainers don't own macs; PR's welcome. You might also file an issue with Apple." would be a perfectly reasonable response.
Apple docs are some of the worst on the planet. It's like they intend on making the barrier to entry high so once you are in the club you somehow have prestige.
No, you have Stockholm syndrome.
An insecure group member feels threatened by an outsider and lashes out. Another group member sees an outsider triggering a group member and he immediately jumps into help. Together, they attack the outsider and drive him off.
I think if the maintainer was less insecure and more able to take critique, the exchange wouldn't have aroused the "fight or flight" instincts of the group.
It's a curious hill to die on, so to speak.
You're really not willing to use an excellent piece of software because one time you saw a dev dismiss someone who didn't like the default color scheme? How is that not even more petty?
You sure aren't running out of creative synonyms to make drama over a pretty insignificant incident.
> "The default green is 0xb9ca4a [which is actually yellow](https://www.color-hex.com/color/b9ca4a)."
While I agree that 0xb9ca4a is not a good choice for a default green, I disagree with the claim that it's yellow. In fact, the website that user cited for their "which is actually yellow" claim doesn't say what that user claims. That website says:
> Color #b9ca4a contains mainly GREEN color.
To my eyes, it's puke green. And the shades and tints of this color shown on that page make it clear that this is green.
It's equally "toxic" imo to torpedo a project, and all the efforts because of some bad communication.
Sure, the dev did fly off the handle initially but if you read the whole tread, he comes around, and actually keeps responding - in other words he cares.
We already seldomnly argue the point anymore. Now it seems we don't even evaluate software at core value anymore, rather we must know the personality of its creators.
I doubt my comment is going to torpedo anything. But I didn't put down alacritty for "personality" reasons. There are a lot of excellent terminal emulators out there. This github issue wasn't an isolated incident, and if the devs are regularly this hostile there's bound to be lots of issues like this that won't be fixed. Especially since my OS is only nominally supported.
I wish Kitty had more hype going for it, it deserves it more IMO.
I'd be insulted too. Wording choices matter.
Frankly, that is a total misrepresentation to call that verbal abuse. What it is, is frustrated devs dealing with a rudely worded and pointless issue.
That issue is literally just trying to start a bikeshed about a color in a standard color scheme they chose as the default. It could not be more useless. On top of that, they try to start that bikeshed by simply saying "the colors are wrong" and pointing to a terrible screenshot.
Open source devs have to deal with a ton of unproductive garbage issues that they are not paid to deal with which risks engendering total burnout. It is way too much to ask them to treat every single person with kid gloves especially when they are opening issues from a place of disrespect.