Ask HN: Contrast-Aware Terminal Emulator

I've long been annoyed by unreadable color choices in command-line apps. Dark-blue-on-black. Bright-yellow-on-white. I often find myself squinting or leaning into the screen just to read some text -- or worse, subconsciously avoiding the terminal altogether.

Even `ls` on an fresh Fedora install has bad color defaults. In the dark theme, normal dirs are dark-blue-on-black. In the light theme, sticky-bit dirs are black-on-dark-green. Neither is easy to read.

Tweaking the terminal's color theme isn't a solution, because different apps use colors in different combinations, and colors that make one app look better will make another app look worse. Some "modern" terminal apps use 24-bit colors which aren't theme-able at all.

I think a better place to solve this is at the terminal emulator layer. I'd love to use a terminal that checks the contrast between the foreground/background colors for every character, and adjusts colors on the fly if the contrast is too low.

A couple kind commenters here pointed me to iTerm2 and Windows Terminal, but neither are available on Linux. Are there any Linux terminals that have this feature?