Comment by sim7c00 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sim7c00 | Hacker News Reader

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Step2: do agree with the fact someone making a CLI tool should respect user preferences. it's also much easier just not to use the sequences in the tool so I don't get why people would do that in the first place :S.

Step 1: I think here maybe the default setting should be solarized-dark/light on terminals. It's honestly a good and sane default. It's purpose built to be less hostile on the eyes in my opinion, which should likely be what's aimed for in a default setting... the themes and colors are there for people who like to stare at their terminal all day (if you only use it once or twice then you don't care about what color it has) so it should be eye-friendly defaults. if people want to muck about changing it to their own custom theme they won't be bothered about defaults anyway since they will immediately customize it.

I personally hate the fact I even need to swap a theme, or download and reformat some Xresources file tediously (while looking at godawful colors in the process!). I just want my eyes not to burn.. don't care what colors yield that result.

I would disagree that solarized is a good default, the colour it uses for blue (which is used by `ls' to show directories) is so low contrast it wears my eyes out.

Seconded. By all means, people should use what they personally like, but solarized is really not designed to be a terminal mapping. Half the brights get mapped to totally different hues and the other half get mapped to indistinguishable shades of gray. Yes, the standard terminal color values are hideous, but we can do better than solarized.

What would you recommend?

Same questions to others who've posted qualms with Solarized.

I tend not to spend much time configuring things these days so have always landed on Solarized out of laziness.

To reiterate, I'm not here to say anyone is wrong for using solarized, only that as a terminal default it would eliminate the ability of terminal applications to assume that bright green, bright blue, bright cyan, and bright yellow are anything other than shades of gray. If that's fine for your use case, then no harm. And plenty of people tweak solarized to make these colors usable and distinguishable, but of course this obviates the whole light mode/dark mode party trick that is solarized's raison d'etre.

There are lots of websites out there where people have shared their terminal color schemes, I would recommend seeking one out and looking for a screenshot of one that catches your eye.

Don’t worry, I wasn’t taking your comment as personal critique. :)

And to be fair to Solarized, it was really novel when it came out. But we’ve had years to improve upon it since.

So I’m genuinely interested to hear some recommendations. Ideally themes that are “standardised” (for lack of a better phrase) so that I’m likely to find a VSCode theme as well as iTerm2 etc.

I know I could just look online myself but customisation can quickly end up becoming an “addiction” (again, for want a better phrase) where you spend more time “configuring” than “doing”. A procrastination trap I’ve fallen into many times before. The appeal of Solarized is its better than most defaults and it’s easy to find so that stops me from spending too much time playing. And the appeal of having someone else tell me to use something else is that I also don’t fall into that proverbial rabbit hole.

Totally fair. In truth, modern terminal emulators have come a long way since the days of opening up CMD.exe or Putty and cringing at their peaked RGB sliders. Nowadays when I install a new terminal it tends to come with a decent color scheme out of the box. But if you insist, I could extract the color scheme that I made for myself a decade ago, though I decline to give it its own name or website. :P

Selenized maybe

https://github.com/jan-warchol/selenized/blob/master/whats-w...

For some reason that blue is a problem in a lot of color schemes. It's a good test for me though. If I can't read the output of ls, I dump the color scheme.

Solarized it too low-contrast for my eyes. For some people low-contrast means easy on the eyes, for others it is the opposite.

I completely agree. And for what it's worth, I set Solarized dark as the default theme on the terminal emulator I've written. Though it's not quite ready to be used as anyone's primary TERM just yet.

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