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Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

One boring and banal problem I ran in to was that it will output text in yellow and some other colours which are hard to read on my white terminal background, and this is hard-coded and you can't disable colours (doesn't even disable with isatty). IIRC Evan didn't really want to fix it because "just use a dark background then".

This is basically why I never used elm: because the compiler is hard to use as I struggle reading its output.

(Before anyone comments "why don't you change yellow in your terminal": then this will break applications such as pamix which hard-code to a black background and use yellow text on that, or applications which have a black statusbar or the like with yellow text on it – it's not so easy to choose colours that work in all scenarios and all things considered sticking to the default set is the "least broken" since almost everything has an option to just disable colours).

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Fellow light theme user here. Forced terminal colors are the bane of my existence. I would kill for a contrast-aware terminal emulator that forces every character to have a minimum contrast with its background.

VScode terminal has this

I just tried it and it's exactly what I was hoping for! Unfortunately though the terminal can't run standalone: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/34442

You can probably hack suckless' st terminal to do this without too much effort (just checking for \x1b[41m and \x1b[100m and the reverse attribute is probably enough, not many use the 256 colours or true colours to set the background, although you can make it as complex as you want).

For 99% of things it's not really an issue so I never bothered: you can either configure the colours or you can just disable them fairly easily.

iTerm2 on the Mac has this. It's a "minimum contrast" slider from 0 to 100% which does what you'd expect. It's nice that it's adjustable.

Windows Terminal has something like this, but finds a way to screw it up. I use Windows Terminal for development over SSH in my current job. It has a checkbox "Automatically adjust lightness of indistinguishable text" (non-adjustable), but it doesn't seem to change the cursor. Whatever colour I set the cursor to, whatever shape, and even with blinking, the cursor is nearly invisible in some of the terminal tools I use, when it is close to the background colour. Even ancient terminal emulators pick a contrasting colour for the cursor. It is an obvious requirement, and Windows Terminal does the opposite, so you can see text but not the cursor.

So much for the vaunted 'friendly compiler messages' that Elm is so praised for!

Would you mind creating a github issue for it? I’ll try to get it fixed for the december release (0.3 is releasing next week, which doesn’t leave me with enough time to do it now).

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